The current system of monetisation disincentivises investigative journalism in favour of clickbait and sensationalism. We must find a new model - perhaps technology can help make high quality journalism sustainable again?

New social media communities have bred a renewed interest in radical politics, particularly among the youth generation. Will this culture persist only online, or can we bring our digital communities into the real world to bolster left-wing struggle here?

Join Left Culture Club’s panel event, where we talk about the benefits and pitfalls of using social media to organise online in the digital age.

Angie Speaks is an anarchist video essayist and Youtuber.

BadmanMassive is a video producer for Zero Books and Means TV UK, and host of the YouTube-based Spicy Takes series.

Xexizy (aka. Muke) is a Marxist vlogger and streamer, and founder of the Marxist society at the University of Sussex.

The solar power industry is growing remarkably fast worldwide, with over 100GW installed for the first time in 2018 and over 120GW expected in 2019. This is largely driven by rapidly dropping costs and increasing competitiveness of solar electricity with gas and coal in many countries, almost regardless of action on climate change. Over the past decade, the price of solar modules has fallen over 90% and the big challenges for solar power have moved beyond the cost of electricity, to much bigger questions about the future of electricity.

A new book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, introduces key concepts in finance and renewable energy and provides a readable introduction to the world of business as it applies to solving the energy portion of climate change. It covers startup culture from a personal angle, some less successful examples of solar companies with candid interviews of the founders, and explanations of concepts like levelised cost of energy, the power markets and the experience curve.

Author Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at financial information provider BloombergNEF, has been tracking solar price, demand, technology and investment since 2006 and aims to write the book she should have read as a student wanting to work in clean energy. This evening will be a chance to meet the author and talk about renewable energy with like-minded people.

The book is available from publisher World Scientific Publishing here and on Amazon here.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Our planet is in ecological crisis and everyday we are seeing the effects of increasing climate breakdown. Yet from Heathrow expansion to debates over land use, time and again the environmental movement comes up against barriers to achieving the significant systemic change that is needed.

To secure democratic consent for the significant actions we will need to take, we need to understand how to bring more people into the conversation and reach out beyond the activist base. This means exploring how we can create a positive vision of a greener future for everyone in society.

How can we get people to understand the scale and urgency of the challenge without them feeling hopeless? How can we understand and more effectively counter right wing populism and conspiracy theories which deny climate change? At this meet up we’ll be looking at how we can start working together more concretely to solve some of these pressing challenges.

If you know someone who you think needs to be in the room, please do invite them too! We’re really keen to hear from a range of perspectives across the movement and working at different levels.

We’ll spend some time talking about what we all want to get out of the group - learning, networking, or something else entirely. Then there will be plenty of time to get to know your fellow tech and news nerds over booze and food.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Democracy is a contested term. We agree that it means: “rule by the people”. But we also acknowledge that in a modern nation state the people need to elect representatives to govern them. Information then must circulate between citizens and the government in order to ensure that ‘the people have the power’. But what are the best mechanisms for this? What are the institutions that we absolutely need? Are there any red lines?

We often talk about various digital structures ‘undermining democracy’. But if we cannot agree what democracy is, then how do we agree that it is being undermined? How can we then look to how to use digital to promote democratic ideals?

The purpose of this meetup is to meet people who are working in adjacent fields to enable collaboration. However, we also have some exciting provocations lined up to help stimulate conversation:

Matthew d’Ancona - partner at Tortoise Media and columnist for GQ, the Evening Standard and the Guardian. Matt has decades of experience commentating on politics and has written many books including: “Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back”.

Nafisa Bakkar - founder and CEO of Amaliah and CEO of Halal Gems. Amaliah is dedicated to representing Muslim women. It has a reach of 3.2 million across all editorial channels and publishes on topics from lifestyle to relationships to fashion and politics.

Gemma Milne - tech and science journalist and co-founder of Science: Disrupt. Gemma has written for many publications including Forbes, the Guardian and the BBC. Her latest book focusses on hype and is called: “Smoke and Mirrors”. It is out next year and helps form a realistic understanding of what is going on in tech and science today.

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

Top notch speakers. Wot else?

Tamsin Omond on Extinction Rebellion and how they are shaking up campaigning

Pete Moorey on what campaigners can learn from the Marvel Comic Universe

Joe Mitchell on Democracy Club’s fantastic election tools

.. more to come

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting. Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

With the prospect of a general election becoming ever more likely, now more than ever we need to build bridges between technologists and activists on the ground.

Join Campaign Lab for our event Campaign Confessions where we invite candidates, organisers and activists from across the country to share their campaign challenges and where they think Campaign Lab volunteers can help.

For our event, we’ll be joined by Patrick Alcantara & Joe Morrison who are leading the local campaign to unseat Boris in Uxbridge, and Jessie Joe Jacobs one of the Labour Candidates for Tees Valley Mayor, where Labour lost a lot of ground to the Tories in the last election. Our third speaker is to be confirmed.

During the panel and breakout session we’ll explore how the speakers are currently running their campaigns, their current practices in an effort to identify where there is space for innovation and improvement - asking our candidates and activists: how can the Campaign Lab community help their campaigns to innovate?

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

A meetup for effective altruists who work in/are interested in software, data or tech.

6:30pm: Doors open

7:00pm: Coworking time and/or networking

This month there will be time for co-working if you wish, bring a laptop and feel free to work on EA-related projects with likeminded folks! Otherwise, you’re welcome to use the time for networking as normal.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

An informal meetup for people interested in effective altruism and want to work on their own projects or self study.

This may be as individuals or in groups, but we plan to work for 50+ minutes then break at least once and maybe up to three times depending on how much you want to do, with the rest of the evening set aside for socialising and discussing what you’re working on with others.

Note: This event is targeted at people who already know about Effective Altruism. If you’re new to EA, start with one of the newcomer socials advertised here: https://www.facebook.com/LondonAltruism

Meet people working with Wikidata, learn to use SPARQL to query the database and visualise data in interesting ways! Please bring a laptop to work on.

This is the fourth Wikidata meetup organised by Wikimedia UK at Newspeak House. We hope to support the community of people working with Wikidata and encourage new people to get involved in the project.

This event will be aimed at training people to query Wikidata using SPARQL, a coding language similar to SQL which is commonly used to query databases. SPARQL is not a complicated coding language, and the basics of it can be learned easily, especially if you have previous experience of working with data. This event is aimed at people who want to learn the basics of data science, or people already working in that field.

Wikidata is becoming increasingly important, and data science skills are increasingly sought after by employers in the tech sector. This training will help you get acquainted with some basic concepts in data science, or improve your skills at working with and visualising data.We think this could especially appeal to people studying data science, data journalism or any other data-related field, as well as established data scientists and journalists who want to improve their skills.

Non-alcoholic refreshments will be provided.

If you have a Wikidata project you’re working on and would like to do a 5-10 minute presentation on, please contact me about it - john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk

You don’t have to have attended the first event to come along to this one, and you can see the outputs of that event here: http://bit.ly/TFGJulAllAssets

For this August meetup, the Cyberdelic Society (whose co-founder Carl M Smith spoke at last month’s event) will host a Collective Intelligence summit in order to explore how immersive technologies can be radically recontextualised to help tackle some of the grand challenges humanity is currently facing.

The Cyberdelic Society will set the scene by sharing the outputs from our recent XR for XR event which explored how immersive technologies can be utilised to help combat the climate and extinction crisis. The full video of the XR for XR event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzwfzwaI81Q

Help us build the collective intelligence around Tech for Good solutions by sharing your opinions, ideas and skills. What are the most relevant areas of concern for you? We look forward to this process of collectively co-creating.

KEY QUESTIONS:

How do we ensure technologies are part of the solution rather than the source of the problem?

How are we going to use the power of technology to radically change lives and the environment for the better?

How can we use technology to help us imagine and realise the level of transformation needed to meet the challenges we face?

KEY CONCERNS:

How can we avoid replacing imagination with computer animation?

What do our current imaging and sensing technologies already do to our perception of reality?

If our senses are enhanced or augmented will we become distracted – or more mindful and connected?

What are the biological and psychological risks of altering your perception with technology?

Is transformative technology just a shortcut for people who lack the willpower for consistent work with their bodies, breath, meditation and sitting in silence?

Do AR/VR/MR/AI (XR) experiences endanger people from getting lost further inside the simulation?

Do Cyberdelics promise a ‘shortcut’ to a false experience of ‘awakening’/‘enlightenment’?

Why rely on something external when we have all the answers, power and ability to be conscious co-creators of this ‘world’/’reality’ within ourselves?

POTENTIAL APPLICATION AREAS:

How can we use immersive tech to both measure the impact we are having on our environment and also explore some appropriate systems change solutions?

How can we use immersive tech to expand our experience of ourselves and the reality we live in?

How can we create truly transformative experiences within these immersive technologies?

How can these technologies help us to reprogram our associations and see ourselves from other perspectives (including the non-human)?

How can we design and use these technologies to contribute to individual and collective awakening?

What is the healing potential of these technologies?

How can hybrid technological devices, of often-prosthetic alienation, help us to reconnect to ourselves and to the surrounding environment?

To what extent can we influence our internal processes and bodily sensations using external sources? How adaptable is our perception?

How much can we understand the rules that govern our minds and bodies through these technologies?

How can artificial senses be used to access a greater dynamic range of reality?

If there is appetite, this may form the first in a series of follow-ups along this theme, led by the Cyberdelic Society.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

How did Facebook allow an obscure data company named Cambridge Analytica hack the 2016 US presidential election? Why did they do it? What have been the consequences for democracy?

In this enlightening documentary join film makers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim as we explore the motivations of some of the key players in the story and the journey of those that tried to hold them to account.

Featuring some familiar Newspeak House community faces, this is a must see for anyone interested in increasingly murky intersection between politics, data and ethics in elections.

Popcorn will be provided.

“You leave with a very clear sense of how one company aided and abetted the selling of democracy down the river, not to mention having your fingernails chewed down to the quick.” - David Fear, Rolling Stone

Climate disaster and far-right politics continue to pose an increasing threat in Britain, the rest of our continent and the world. It is time to act. Time to get organised.

DiEM members and supporters from London and the surrounding area will gather on the 8th of August for a third time - this time in the Newspeak House in Bethnal Green, where we will continue to discuss DiEM policy, how to get organised and the future of Europe.

The overarching goal will be to set up AT LEAST ONE new London local group!

There will be a loose agenda for the evening, including a “creative space” at the end of our meet-up.

Considering the great interested in the “Green New Deal for Europe”, our plan to tackle the threat of climate disaster and the burning injustices in Europe and beyond, you can find out more about it here: https://www.gndforeurope.com/

A reading group focusing on systems management, where an organisation or group is considered as one or more living systems and this perspective is used to assess how such a system could be structured to function at the highest level possible. This could consider multiple facets of the system, including the individuals working in the system, physical environment, virtual spaces used, tools available, media used for communication, how teams are structured and how information travels, is processed and stored (and more)!

The general intention is that by developing our ability to understand systems we’ll be better equipped to improve (or at least assess) the organisations or groups we work in or with, whether not-for-profit, corporate, or government.

The book for this month is The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, by Sidney Dekker.

We meet roughly monthly on a weekday evening to eat and discuss that month’s book, including its ideas and any practical applications (the day of the week varies). There is no set reading list - the next book is generally chosen at the meeting.

Past books include Thinking in Systems (Meadows) and Doing the Impossible (Slotkin).

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Are you digitally able? A videographer? A copy writer? A social media mastermind? London Green Party has put together a Green Party Hackathon on the 3rd August to help put together a digital campaign from scratch.

Work with Sian Berry to put together a housing campaign designed to push the Mayor and local Councils to take radical Green backed action!

Spaces are limited so please fill out this form to let us know how you want to contribute. We’ll be in touch to confirm places.

Join us for a day of making, playing, failing, and doing as we take a Hackathon and a Scratch Night and smash them together.

About this event

We invite those from the arts and technology worlds, as well as anyone interested in different ideas and new approaches, to come along to this open and relaxed forum for the creation and testing of work that combines digital and immersive technology with artistic practice.

The Hack strand will be a chance for tech people and art people to get together to test an idea, iterate on a concept or demonstrates a method none of which existed at the beginning of the day. They’ll be working away all day and will show off what they’ve created at the open sharing session.

We will give you the chance to try out work in development from those participating in the Scratch strand. Similar to traditional theatre scratch nights we invite direct and collaborative feedback from audiences, but with the pieces growing and changing throughout the day. The Scratch space will be open to the public for free from 12 – 5pm, no sign up required.

The day will culminate in an open sharing session at 5:30pm before we head to Newspeak’s terrace to reflect on the work of the day over a BBQ and drinks.

Further details and participant details to follow. Sign up so you don’t miss out.

Though our open call has now closed there may still be possibilities to participate - get in touch via connect@trajectorytheatre.com.

About your hosts

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, or email us at connect@trajectorytheatre.com.

Why fight for a just digital future if there might be no future at all?

Technology crisis and climate crisis have many aspects in common: they are both often invisible, yet pervasive in their impact. Whether it is privacy, bias in AI or open data, the digital human rights community often fights for more equal and just futures while vastly ignoring the environmental crisis we are currently facing.

In this meet up series we want to initiate, map and advance the intersection between digital human rights and climate crisis. That means that we want to figure out how to create a sustainable social, environmental and technological future. By that we aim to go beyond current debates in the community that include arguments such as 1) we need to fly less 2) we need to repair devices 3) bitcoin consumes too much energy. We want to figure out how topics such as bias in AI or open source can be combined with the very idea of sustainability. We want to deepen the intersection between technology and nature.

At this first Sustainable Tech Meetup in London Katrin will give a short introduction with some initial thoughts on the topic. Then we will discuss how the intersection of digital human rights and climate crisis can advance. We will collect national and international initiatives that already work at the tech for good/sustainability intersection to make a first overview. Also, we are going to create a roadmap for more research and activism to advocate for a sustainable social, environmental and technological future.

The Sustainable Tech Meet Up and Newspeak are very happy to receive donations. Please bring pen and paper. If you want to contribute with an input or if you have any questions contact Katrin on Twitter at @KatrinFritsch, private messages are open.

“We have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before. How are we going to use it? This whole attitude of using technology as a method of fighting the world will succeed only in destroying the world. Technology and its powers must be handled by… people who cherish… above all, the Earth, and treat it with the reverence that is due to one’s own body.” - Alan Watts

How are we going to use the power of technology to radically change lives for the better? That’s a question we will explore in this meetup to really find out if we’re thinking and acting radical enough in applying technology to solve the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Tech for Good is certainly gaining mainstream recognition and popularity, but so is our collective appreciation and recognition of the scale of existential threats facing humanity.

How can we use technology to help us imagine and realise the level of transformation needed to meet the challenges we face? Who is involved? Who needs to be? This event will look at some more ambitious and consciousness-shifting applications and explorations within tech.

The event will start with speakers, then open out into a facilitated ‘citizens assembly’ style discussion where we invite you to bring your ears and ideas.

As always, we’ll have our community announcements at the end, which is a chance for attendees to share an update, funding opportunities, jobs and more with the community. If you’d like to share yours in advance with the organisers, email us at mail@techforgood.tv.

We charge £3 (+VAT) to help manage the number of people who show up on the night, which goes towards the cost of running the event. We don’t want this to become a barrier to attendance, so please get in touch via Meetup messages or directly via mail@techforgood.tv if this causes a problem for you. Furthermore, if you need a VAT receipt please email mail@techforgood.tv.

Our speakers are:

Cassie Robinson, National Lottery Community Fund / The Point People / Tech for Good Global / CAST / Nesta New Radicals Awards: Cassie wears multiple hats in the tech for good space, which gives her a rare perspective on the field and the changes within it. She’ll discuss some of the key burning questions she feels we should all be asking, and who’s working to answer them currently. She’ll set the scene for the citizens assembly discussion around different possible futures, and the challenges we must overcome to get there.

Carl H Smith, Ravensbourne University London / The Cyberdelics Society / The London Experimental Psychonautics Club / Contextology: Carl is a regular writer and speaker on Humanism, Transhumanism and Hyper-Humanism, and how a new mental model can help us better shape our relationship with technology and the world around us. He will share examples of where mixed reality and other XR technologies are enabling positive context engineering, as well as new modes of thinking and embodiment. He will also share the outputs from a recent XR for XR event, hosted by the Cyberdelics Society which explored how immersive technologies can be utilised to help combat the climate and extinction crisis.

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In her new book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea argue that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, the book constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources, that might hold relevance for similar concepts today, like the Internet? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?

Future Histories has been described by Claire L. Evans as “a potent, timely, and unrepentantly radical reminder of history’s creative potential.” O’Shea will be talking about some of the questions raised by her book and how we can use history to fight for a democratic digital tomorrow.

Often referred to as one of the fathers of systems thinking, Dr John Gall was the first to articulate the counterintuitive nature of systems, in particular how they succeed and how they fail. He is best known for his seminal work The Systems Bible. A Renaissance man, as well as writing on systems, John worked as a paediatrician writing books on parenting, child development, historical novels and memoirs.

Join Newspeak House in warmly welcoming his wife Carol Gall for a special guest lecture celebrating John’s work and their life together.

Carol Gall married Dr Gall in 1994 and for many years worked in his medical office. Together they taught parenting classes and jointly authoring Hit by a Low-Flying Goose a book about their experiences. She has worked as a piano teacher, a special education teacher and tutor, a family counsellor, specialising in young offenders and as a lecturer in child development and music.

In this lecture Carol will explore some of John’s later thinking laid out in his unpublished work and share stories that illustrate some of the many concepts raised in The Systems Bible. Alongside this she will share some of the many personal biographical anecdotes and memories of her life with John that inspired his thinking around systems. The listener does not need a background in systems theory to enjoy and learn from this lecture about John’s life and work.

Labour for a Public Vote is setting up an independent, activist-led grassroots organisation to fight Brexit and promote a left wing remain and reform agenda, called Remain and Reform: Grassroots. They’re proposing a predominantly non-hierarchical structure which they hope will encourage autonomy and engagement - in short, you’re encourage you to get involved, and take a lead on the issues that you’re passionate about.

They are eliciting ideas from across the UK, and from across Europe, in order to develop a transformative agenda that can win widespread public support for our EU membership, and which can win support for the changes needed to make our economy fairer, our societies safer and more secure, and to help us stop climate chaos.

They’re looking for activists who want to be there at the start of this journey, and want to help shape this project from the outset. If this sounds like you, come to their first organising meeting when they’ll discuss all this and more in an open and friendly setting.

Presenting the community powered tourism platform Fairbnb.coop, and kicking off the search for someone to develop the London node!

Fairbnb.coop platform cooperative is a community-centred alternative to current vacation rental platforms that prioritises people over profit and offers the potential for authentic, sustainable, and intimate travel experiences.

As a community of engaged citizens, researchers, and people coming from a variety of professional backgrounds and different cities we have been working together for several years to create the platform, and the beta version is finally nearly ready to be released.

We are now looking for like minded people to foster the creation of Local Nodes in towns and cities in the UK.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Brave Conversations was created to bring thinking around Web Science and the Social Machine to mainstream conversations that occur in everyday life. Its objective is to demystify the world of emerging technologies and enable an exploration of the impact that these technologies will have on our selves, our communities, our societies and our planet.

We deliberately create a space where everyone can be brave, can say the things that they know need to be said, and be prepared to apply intellectual rigour to challenging ideas that might take us to uncomfortable places.

Background

In 2008 a group of people from industry, government, academia, and the community sectors came together to create the first Brave Conversations (then called the Meta conference) to create a forum for people to discuss and debate the emerging issues related to humans and their use of digital technologies.

At about the same time a group of luminaries from the Web world were creating Web Science in order to focus interdisciplinary research on precisely the same thing.

Since that time the world has changed.

The Web has evolved from being read-only to read-write and now dominates how the majority of society interacts with digital platforms, giving rise to the largest companies of the modern era. These companies are now pushing the boundaries for how data and information are used and are becoming a key driver for the next step in human evolution.

We can all feel that the world ahead is very different from the world behind, but:

How often do we find the time to step back, to engage in robust and challenging dialogue and debate with others from diverse backgrounds about what sort of future we want to create?

How often do we feel that our opinions are respected, that we have the space to imagine real possibilities, and that we can take some proactive control of the world that is emerging?

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge everyone who participates - regardless of what background they come from, or what their skillset and expertise are - to more fully explore and understand the interplay between humans, the societies we live in, and the technologies we have created.

We want to empower people to proactively make decisions about how we live our everyday lives, how we participate as commercial actors within the economy, and how we operate as digital citizens and exercise our political rights. That empowerment comes from demystifying data and information and understanding how it informs the everyday decisions which gradually create the future.

Each of those decisions begin on an individual human level - our bodies and our minds - and then emanates out to our families, communities, societies and from there to nation states. We are all responsible for the world we are creating and never has there been a time when we have more potential to influence the changes around us. But we need to be given the space for robust debate and respectful curiosity, learning from each other, playing with ideas, and asking the questions that are both confronting and potentially will take us to uncomfortable places.

How it works

The best way to learn is through experience and the act of playing with ideas.

We have deliberately chosen to partner with Newspeak House to co-host Brave Conversations London 2019 to build on the work we have been doing around the world over the past two years. Our aim is to enable that teams of diverse participants to critically examine our current societies through the lens of systems, communications, governance and technology.

How do we better create a culture of mutual aid, reciprocity, co-operation, and collaboration in our cities?

How can more public social eating spaces be made and how can they be more inclusively designed?

At a time when public services are increasingly under threat, can we create an entirely new one?

The National Food Service is a new idea. A public system emerging from a network of social eating spaces across the UK. The goal is to enable social eating spaces to better interrelate, tackle common issues as a unified body, and provide a collaborative, inclusive welfare system for all.

Join members of the NFS Campaign as they explain their vision for the organisation, detail the progress so far, and invite the audience to contribute their ideas to the project.

This event is free to attend. Donations for the evening meal are optional, and not expected. Please email ‘‘nationalfoodservicecampaign@gmail.com’’ about dietary requirements.

Running order:

18.00: Doors open

18.30: Campaign update - What is the NFS, and what have we been doing?

more onion is an award winning digital agency behind the Campaignion platform, which delivers high-impact digital campaigns and fundraising for progressive non-profits. Come and meet the more more onion team as well as fundraisers and campaigners from across the UK charity sector.

ON THE AGENDA

New Campaignion features - thank you page overlays, custom redirects and more

Campaign showcase - how Compassion in World Farming have gathered over a million signatures for their #EndTheCageAge European Citizen’s Initiative

Consultation report launch - be the first to see tips, best practice and case studies from Young Minds, Stonewall, Open Rights Group and more on helping your supporters take part in public consultations

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, reasearchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

We think that discussing the ethics and impacts of data science is important, but also, kind of fun? There’s a lot of good writing out there and one of the most important principles is to discuss and debate the ethical questions. We hope this will help people gain the tools they need to think about this in their jobs or in DataKind projects, or in encountering algorithmic tools in their everyday life. But if all you get out of it is some friendly discussion over a coffee or beer, that’s also good.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

Wikipedia is one of the first places that people go to find out information about any subject. Google’s search results privilege Wikipedia links highly, and many Wikipedia pages receive millions of views a year. It’s hugely important for fans and music companies to ensure that their artists are well-represented on the site.

Join the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and Wikimedia UK for the latest AIM Academy workshop, with expert guidance on how music companies and artists can fully optimise and understand Wikipedia.

Why Wikipedia is important for you and your artists

Having a Wikipedia page is a sign that an artist is established and successful. Because the text is Open Licensed, it can be reused elsewhere - Spotify and the BBC use biographies from Wikipedia for artists listed on their sites.

Images used on Wikipedia also end up appearing elsewhere, so uploading a good image of your artist is a way to influence how other sites present your them.

Wikipedia pages will be added to and curated by fans, so it’s also a way that fans can engage with the artists they care about.

Wikipedia pageviews are open – find out about how to access your data (page views, edits, editors etc) and how to analyse it. Did you know these pageviews count towards some charts.

Who should attend?

Anyone with an interest in understanding Wikipedia and open licences.

Anyone working in artist marketing, press, promo or label management.

Self-releasing artists, or anyone who manages their own online presence.

Thanks to breakthroughs in science and technology, the future could be profoundly better than the present – provided we recognise this opportunity, and take appropriate actions.

In this vision, there will be an abundance of all-round human flourishing. Everyone will have the means to live better than well - healthier and fitter than ever before; nourished emotionally and spiritually as well as physically; and living at peace with ourselves, the environment, and our neighbours both near and far.

That’s the vision of the Transhumanist Party UK. The Party is developing a set of bold top level targets for the UK to seek to achieve by 2035. These goals are intended to be memorable, clear, and inspiring.

A number of these goals have already been publicised (text/video) and are generating a rich set of feedback (feedback survey!)

This meeting is a chance to join members, supporters, friends, and critics of the Transhumanist Party UK to take this discussion further forward:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Party’s current set of goals for 2035?

What are the most important steps to take to significantly enhance all-round human flourishing by 2035?

And bearing in mind both the potential and constraints of both technology and politics, what transformations would need to be well advanced by 2025?

The event will involve a short presentation followed by an extended discussion of roadmap options and priorities. It’s free to attend, but numbers will be restricted, so please RSVP in advance.

Join Wikimedia UK and Open Street Map UK for a joint event, following on from Open Street Map’s AGM earlier in the day. The plan is to get people interested in Wikidata to meet people from the OSM community and talk about possible areas of collaboration.

If you would like to present a short talk of 5-10 minutes about a Wikidata or OSM project you are working on, please email john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk to let us know that you would like to speak.

There will be room for people to meet and discuss their projects, and hopefully the weather might be nice and we can also use the outside terrace. So whether you want to come and talk about a specific project or just to meet other Wikidata and OSM users to find out more about the projects, come and join us for a casual discussion of all things OpenData and OpenMaps!

The future of governance is distributed. Exchange ideas and get a glimpse into our governance track at Web3 Summit. Also: Open afterparty!

Are you involved or interested in distributed governance, future of governance, DAOs, blockchain governance? Join us on Friday, June 28 at Newspeak House and discuss related topics in an open conference format.

This will be the official after-party drinks to the OPEN 2019 Event (www.open.coop). So, prepare to welcome the participants from the conference too, discussing P2P, co-ops and distributed governance.

We will run a similar format to the DGOV Council, with open discussion format and some lightning talks. If you’re working on an interesting project related to Decentralized Governance, DAOs or Blockchain and want to share it: please drop an email to dgov-london@unruh.fr

Phoebe Tickell will share ideas and thoughts from the dgov retreat in May with us. Also, there might be a glimpse into our preparation for the dedicated track on governance during Web3 Summit on August 19-21 in Berlin.

Join charity campaigners from across the sector to learn how to communicate effectively with stakeholders in government.

Hattie FitzGerald, former campaigner and now a civil servant at the Home Office, will talk about how charity campaigns and communications are viewed from within a Government department, and how to land your messages most effectively.

Simon Morrison is Deputy Chief Executive at Nesta, the innovation foundation working to bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good. He has extensive experience of communications, and whilst at the Home Office led one of the most comprehensive media engagement and public affairs programmes in the UK. We’ll be talking to Simon about what he learned and how it shaped the way he now approaches influencing stakeholders in Government.

This event is for charity campaigners to discuss best practice and challenges in campaigning for change. We meet quarterly to hear from expert speakers, share ideas and build relationships across the sector. New members are always welcome.

Registration will open at 13:30 with the event starting promptly at 14:00. The session will finish at 16:00.

Trajectory Theatre brings together the brightest minds in the XR community for an evening of debate and discussion.

Like most technologies XR has seen a lot of its research and early exploration performed under the banner of the armed services. Without long term investment from governments attempting to use it as a tool of military strength, we would not have consumer VR and AR today. Does this then have moral implications for the artists and makers using XR? And what should be our stance on further funding from the military?

SPEAKERS

Bill Thompson is a technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Click on the BBC World Service. He is also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London’s Journalism Department and writes for BBC Webwise.

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, Instagram or email us at connect@trajectorytheatre.com.

Founders and Coders CIC is a UK-based nonprofit that develops and runs tuition-free, peer-led training programmes in web development, guided by our core values of cooperation, inclusion and social impact. We operate in London and work with Mercy Corps and the UK government to deliver programmes in the Middle East and Africa.

Today we’ll discuss upcoming changes to the programme and Tech For Better, as well as have demonstrations of the summer cohort’s prototypes.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.

The first decades of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of a series of disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream has been to stick with the status quo. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.

In his first book, leading political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we might move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

In conversation with Richard Barbrook, Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster. Moderated by Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures.

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and senior editor at Novara Media. He holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action. His research interests include new media, social movements, asymmetric strategies and post-scarcity political economy. He has written for Vice, London Review of Books, Guardian and Open Democracy.

Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.

18:30 – 19:00: Registration & Drinks

19:00 – 20:00: In Conversation with Aaron Bastani

20:00 – 20:30: Audience Q&A

20:30 – Late: Book Signing & Networking

Please register. Discounts are available for students and early career researchers. Contact info@virtualfutures.co.uk for Promo Codes. Tickets are FREE for journalists and members of the press. Virtual Futures (Est.1994) is a Community Interest Company (CIC). Ticket sales help to cover the cost of filming and documentation.

This 2 day workshops will cover elements of the ‘Transition Training’ used by the Transition Towns movement to resources its members. This will include covering the following elements:

Exploring the context issues; such as climate change and peak oil, and wider ecological questions, and social justice and equality.

Introduction to the Transition model and the principles behind it. We will examine the issue of the right scale to create a Transition Initiative. Small groups will experiment with a world cafe style discussion around what experience we bring.

We will explore different types of visioning, including an exploration of the ‘Deep Adaptation’ agenda.

We will look at awareness raising, why we need to do it and how. We will explain how people engage with change and play the awareness raising game. We will also take a look at practical projects.

We will look at groups and group process, in particular the role of the initiating group. We will look more generally at how and why functioning in groups can either be heaven or hell.

We will examine the role of networking and partnerships. A strategic model for building good relationships in your community will be explained.

We will introduce the role and practices of inner transition. What is inner transition, and why is it important. We will offer some psychological models which make it easier for us to incorporate this often neglected and tricky side of Transition.

We will look at what makes a healthy human culture and how to avoid burnout.

We will see us look at the global spread of transition, how to connect with and make best use of the world wide learning network.

Workshop host background:

Naresh Giangrande

Co-founder of Transition Town Totnes, the first Transition Town, and of Transition Training, Naresh has been involved in designing, running and evolving many of the events, groups, and trainings that have been at the heart of the enormously successful Transition project. He has delivered the hundreds of Transition Trainings to thousands of participants in twenty countries worldwide.

As one of the Transition Town founders he has given dozens of lectures and interviews, and spoken at many conferences and other public events. He set up and coordinated the Energy Group of Transition Town Totnes and was a director of Transition Town Totnes Ltd. Before the Transition movement took over his life he lived and worked in an eco community, was Managing Director of a landscape company, and a gaffer in the film industry, as well as teaching meditation.

His work for Transition Network has lead to a passion for working with self-organising systems, and how participatory learning can be fostered and strengthened across the movement. This has lead to coordinating Transition Network’s work with academic researchers. He is fascinated by data analysis and the block chain, while being painfully aware of the preciousness of life, his capacity for love, and acceptance of his own mortality.

He is father to two lovely daughters.

Sophy Banks

Sophy jointly set up the first “Heart and Soul”, or Inner Transition group in Totnes in 2006. She co-founded Transition Training and, during her time at Transition Network, delivered Launch and other workshops to transition projects around the world.

A trainer for over 20 years she has worked as an engineer, information systems consultant and psychotherapist and has considerable experience of voluntary sector and community projects.

In 2016 Sophy stepped back from the Transition movement to give time to her own work and teaching.

We are delighted to be joined by Caroline, Laura and Adeyemi who will introduce their films and join us in a discussion exploring people’s experience of migration and the impact of the Hostile Environment on migrant communities. There will also be an opportunity to hear about what Migrant Solidarity Group, Medact, Docs not cops, and the local MSF group are doing in refugee and migrant health and meet other folk from the group. The event is free to all, no one will be turned away.

From Heathrow expansion to debates over land use, time and again the environmental movement comes up against barriers to achieving the significant systemic change that is needed to tackle climate chaos.

With Extinction Rebellion and the School Climate Strikes bringing unprecedented attention to the threat of inaction and Labour voting to declare a climate emergency, how can we make sure this focus is best utilised? What are the competing priorities within the left that stop more from being achieved? How can we find a way through them? What compromises can we reach? Could a Green New Deal offer the solution?

Join us for a workshop in which we explore how we can build bridges across the left to unlock new and lasting support for a greener future.

The sell out corn-based snack event is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

Top notch speakers. Wot else?

Faty Kane - Girls Not Brides

Ella Goldner - Zinc VC

Alex Chesterfield - behavioural scientist

Deborah Coughlin - Studio X

Ros Urwin - The Sunday Times

.. more to come

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

With deepening funding cuts and an increasing need for support, the services that charities and non-profits provide are more crucial than ever. In short, we need to help more people, but with less funding.

In addition, consumer behaviour and expectations are rapidly changing – as are those of our beneficiaries. People do not change how they want to access and experience services when they switch between sectors – charities and non-profits need to meet these expectations. Frankly, social care needs to catch up.

This event will showcase the journey that Action for Children and the charity sector is embarking on. Exhibitions and speakers will talk about:

developing user-led services that start small

real life examples and (often hard) lessons learned

our vision for the future of digital services – which is scalable and data rich

how to work collaboratively with agencies and funders to achieve real impact for beneficiaries

Speakers include:

Kate Stulberg – UX Lead, Action for Children

Rachael Gilthorpe – Digital Services Manager, Action for Children

Lynn Roberts – Head of Digital and Innovation, Action for Children

Darshan Sanghrajka – Founder, SuperBeingLabs

This event is free to attend, however registration is mandatory to secure your space.

Every other Tuesday we will be meeting up to collaborate on projects, to discuss progress and to learn together. This is a meetup for engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to radical projects, or work on their own projects. The evening will kickoff with a short introduction round, after which you can proceed to work on your own project, join someone else’s or join one of ours.

What is a radical project? Here at Radical Engineers, we have been seeking and contacting organisations which aim to fundamentally change our economic, political and social systems to enhance human autonomy and social equality. We discuss their projects and clarify any technical challenges or needs they may have so that when they are presented to you, our community, you know that they are properly considered and genuinely useful. Our vetting process means that you will only be working on projects which will help not just to fix the symptoms of our economic systems, but aim to contribute to systemic change itself.

Not an engineer? That’s ok too! You would be surprised at the variety of skills needed for projects. Spreadsheet sprites, word wizards and pixel pirates are valued guests and we could always use a hand scoping out new projects!

It’s been a busy few months! We’ve won section 21 but with Theresa May resigning as Prime Minister we are going to have to work hard to push this new legislation over the line.

On Monday 17th June we are coming together to plan out our next steps on Section 21 and more. We’ll work out which campaigns to work on, who we need to join us and what each of us can do to win for renters.

Expect a big conversation about section 21, next steps and building a big network of campaigners.Feel free to bring a friend and some food or drink (if we each bring something , we’ll share a big picnic together).

Join us for a screening of Knock Down The House - the story of four women taking on American politics. Hosted by BBC journalist Catrin Nye at Newspeak House in Shoreditch, this event has been put together by WebRoots Democracy and Unicef’s Next Gen London.

Entry is free of charge and we are planning to hold a Q&A session with one of makers of the film (details tbc). Spaces, however, are limited and you will need to be on the guestlist in order to attend.

When tragedy struck her family in the midst of the financial crisis, Bronx-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to work double shifts in a restaurant to save her home from foreclosure. After losing a loved one to a preventable medical condition, Amy Vilela didn’t know what to do with the anger she felt about America’s broken health care system. Cori Bush was drawn into the streets when the police shooting of an unarmed black man brought protests and tanks into her neighborhood. Paula Jean Swearengin was fed up with watching her friends and family suffer and die from the environmental effects of the coal industry.

At a moment of historic volatility in American politics, these four women decide to fight back, setting themselves on a journey that will change their lives and their country forever. Without political experience or corporate money, they build a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. Their efforts result in a legendary upset.

Democracy is a contested term. We agree that it means: “rule by the people”. But we also acknowledge that in a modern nation state the people need to elect representatives to govern them. Information then must circulate between citizens and the government in order to ensure that ‘the people have the power’. But what are the best mechanisms for this? What are the institutions that we absolutely need? Are there any red lines?

We often talk about various digital structures ‘undermining democracy’. But if we cannot agree what democracy is, then how do we agree that it is being undermined? How can we then look to how to use digital to promote democratic ideals?

The purpose of this meeting is to bring experts in this field together to discuss these difficult issues. There will be provocations, conversation, drinks & snacks.

Psephology is a division of political science that deals with the examination as well as the statistical analysis of elections and political polling. Psephologists and the polls they create and interpret are a powerful force in contemporary politics. They shape our political narratives around elections, govern the news cycle and act as powerful social proof of a campaign’s success or failure.

As trust in polling declines and as technology begins to unlock new sources of political information, we ask what is the future of this discipline and how will it affect campaigning?

So how do psephologists calculate results and turnout? What kind of models, approaches and data do psephologists currently use? Can new approaches be developed using data science techniques which are emerging from different sectors?

For our event, we’ll be joined by Marcus Roberts, Director of International Projects for YouGov and John Sandall, Founder of SixFifty, a community of voluntary data scientists, and software engineers who worked on a model to predict the 2017 election results. (Further speakers to be announced).

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

This event will feature two top data protection experts working “hands on” to devise mechanisms of accountability for personal data processing, with particular focus on artificial intelligence applications. Reuben Binns will present some of the work that he is leading at the Information Commissioner’s Office on AI auditing, while Sophie Stalla Bourdillon will discuss promises and challenges that she has encountered at Immuta in promoting the adoption of responsible data management practices. We’ll thus have the opportunity to hear about cutting-edge issues in this domain from the perspective of both the regulator and the private sector.

Schedule:

6:30 - 7:00 pm Networking time

7:00 - 8:30 pm 2 talks (30 mins + 15 mins Q&A for each speaker)

8:30 - 9:30 pm Networking time and refreshment

Speakers:

Reuben Binns recently joined the ICO on a two-year Research Fellowship. He will research and investigate a framework for auditing algorithms and conduct further in-depth research activities in AI and machine learning. Dr Binns is also a researcher in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research interests include technical, legal and ethical aspects of privacy, machine learning, and decentralised systems. He has a BA and MSc in Philosophy from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Computer Science and Law from the University of Southampton.

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon is Senior Privacy Counsel and Legal Engineer at Immuta, the leading data management platform for data science. She is responsible for examining current data protection and model risk frameworks, helping customers to embed aspects of these frameworks within the Immuta platform, and framing these practices into digestible, easy-to-scale methods so they can better control risk across their data science programs. Sophie is also a professor at the University of Southampton Law School of law, where she co-directs the Web Science Institute. She is the author and co-author of several legal articles, chapters and books on data protection and privacy, including Privacy vs. Security (Springer, 2014). Sophie is Editor-in-chief of the Computer Law and Security Review, a leading international journal of technology law, and has also served as a legal and data privacy expert for the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for the Cooperation and Security in Europe, and for the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation.

The talks and QA will be filmed for people who can’t make the event. For past presentations check out London Mydata on Youtube.

Most people agree that the quality of information and discourse during election and referendum campaigns is too low – both in the UK and in other democracies around the world. But what can be done about it?

Drawing on their recent report for the UCL Constitution Unit, Alan Renwick and Michela Palese will lead a discussion of what our vision for a better democracy should be and what practical steps can be taken to get there. They will explore the lessons that can be learnt from a range of democracies in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific and propose an ambitious new model for transforming how we conceive of democratic campaigning.

Dr Alan Renwick is Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit. He is an expert on elections, referendums, and deliberative democracy, and recently served as Research Director for the Independent Commission on Referendums.

Michela Palese was Research Assistant and McDougall Fellow at the Constitution Unit. She is now Research and Policy Officer at the Electoral Reform Society.

Join Lyrical Science for Minds on Tap, our event series where public audiences listen to scientists discuss their research in the format of 10 minute-long inspiring talks.

Six scientists from King’s College London and University College London will speak about their cutting edge research on Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Motor Neuron Disease. We’ll also share our vision to bring public support and philanthropy to early career researchers in the medical sciences.

You’ll be able to learn more about the state of critical research in this field, network with the scientists over drinks, and discover a new way to get involved in scientific discovery.

The event is open to all members of the public – carers, friends or family members of those who have suffered from neurodegenerative diseases; scientists, science lovers, philanthropists, members of foundations or corporations and anyone interested in helping the scientific community gain the support it needs to conduct critical research on neurodegenerative diseases. Whatever your background, simply come on by, hear the scientists and enjoy the informative and inspiring evening.

At Lyrical Science, we help scientists share their inspiring stories with the public in an effort to connect them with private funders and philanthropists. Scientists are often prevented from doing life saving research by funding shortages outside of their control. This event is about helping brilliant young scientists communicate their research to the public in an inspiring and compelling format. It’s also a call for philanthropists to fund their labs. We’re a team of early career researchers and public speaking creatives across the US and UK and can’t wait to share our vision with you in person.

UnFound is for tech founders and start-ups looking for a different way to set-up and run platform businesses. It brings together platforms that would like to go about their business in a more collaborative and inclusive way.

The European Parliament Election 2019 is a pivotal moment in the history of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, and even more so for the European Union as a whole. How well will DiEM25, the European Green New Deal and the European Spring perform in the 6 countries they are running in? What will the future of the continent look like? How much will the far-right gain?

The Race Beat is a network for people of colour, open to anyone working in, or interested in, journalism.

We are independent of any media organisation and open to all people of colour – experienced news reporters, citizen journalists, students, writers, freelancers, staff writers, broadcasters, media academics, aspiring columnists and critics. You don’t need to be a professional journalist to join us. Come down and get involved!

The May meet up will be a great a chance to get to know people of colour who are interested in the media. We will also be discussing further our big events coming up later in the year, including a panel at Byline Festival on the coverage of climate change the environment. Where are the people of colour?

We are also planning a one day conference in Glasgow on Friday 27 September with Gary Younge as keynote speaker and another day long event in London in November. Both will include workshops, panel discussions, networking.

Bring ideas for who you would you like to see speak at our events this year, or maybe you are a journalist who could offer some training?

This is a space for people of colour only. We welcome queer and trans people of colour and all other identities.

The venue is wheelchair accessible.

About us

We want to create space for writers of colour to come together and begin to:

collaborate on race related stories and reporting projects on a wide range of subjects,

Join us for a special EU Election week event focused on technology’s worrying impacts on UK democracy.

Nearly a year after the General Data Protection Regulation was implemented, questionable data practices on social media advertising are threatening UK elections. We’ll hear from Who Targets Me about their innovative browser extension that improves transparency in online advertising by showing users who is targeting political ads at them and why.

We’ll also hear from our new Data & Democracy Project Officer Pascal Crowe about why we should be concerned about electronic voting trials in the UK. We’ll also hear about ORG’s upcoming event ORGCon.

No technical expertise are necessary, all are welcome to this free event. Attendees will be offered discounted access to our July event ORGCon 2019!

Extinction Rebellion Democratic Socialists is an independent collective of activists within the XR movement who are interested in progressive socialist ideas for concrete political, economic and social change. We view the climate crisis primarily in terms of climate justice: this means that in order to fight climate change, we also need to fight the social systems which drive its destructive march. We sponsor events and workshops dedicated to sparking conversations around movement-building practice, outreach and consciousness-raising, and the practical policy questions that come with any serious committment to de-carbonising the economy within our lifetimes.

This is our launch event! XRDS is a freshly-minted collective, so this will be a relatively informal occasion for people to meet, greet, and share their ideas about what kind of good a group like XRDS could do for Extinction Rebellion and the broader movement to de-carbonise the economy.

Asad Rehman, Executive Director of War on Want, will join us to talk about the need for an intersectional approach to the climate crisis and the need to place the people most affected by climate change at the heart of the movement to defeat it. Asad was Head of International Climate at Friends of the Earth from 2009 to 2017, and has over 25 years’ experience in the non-governmental and charity sector. Asad has served on the boards of Amnesty International UK, Friends of the Earth International, Global Justice Now and Newham Monitoring Project. Find out more at www.waronwant.org

Doors open from 7:00 PM for a start around 7:30. Asad’s presentation will be followed by a period for questions and discussion, which will be followed by time for general networking. Snacks and drinks will be provided.

In this training we will take people through the methodology and practice of an NVDA (non-violent direct action) training. We will discuss what makes an effective training and trainer, as well as the necessary facilitation skills to hold a training session.

Those attending will practice leading the exercises used in our training, and better understand why they are used.

Those attending will NEED to have attended one of our NVDA trainings previously and be prepared to lead the group through various exercises.

As the movement grows, we need to build our base of organisers. This is a great opportunity to develop the tools needed to effectively carry out NVDA training, prepare people for actions, and understand why Civil Disobedience works.

By the end of the session you will be ready to carry out XR NVDA Trainings.

900 million people are currently participating in a massive festival of electoral democracy in India. Over 6 weeks, Indian citizens are going to the ballot to elect 545 MP’s to govern them for five years. 2014 saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi ride a massive wave of anti-incumbency to enter the highest office with a thumping majority. Five years hence, the man and his mania may have waned a little but he remains the favourite to win the elections.

The five years of Modi rule has raised profound questions on the idea of India. His government has witnessed the rise of whatsapp lynchings, Hindutva terror, environmental destruction, devastating fiscal and monetary policies and a near absolute control of popular media.

So how does Modi continue to remain popular? How do we, here in the UK, view these elections? What do the outcomes mean for democratic space and dissent? How social media is shaping the Indian elections?

To discuss these complex questions and engage in a lively debate, we have Salil Tripathi joining us. Salil Tripathi is a senior adviser at the Institute for Human Rights and Business. Based in London, he is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan in India, two respected media outlets. He is currently Chair, PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and an outspoken individual on twitter @saliltripathi

Event format:

A quick primer on Indian elections for 7-10 minutes

Salil Tripathi offering his views for 25 minutes

QnA from the chair for 10 minutes

QnA from the audience for 45 minutes

Come join us for this free event. Please arrive from 6 PM for a 6:30 start. We will wrap up by 8:30 pm.

This event is not being put together by any organisation. We are just individuals interested in Indian politics, culture and society.

Gen:impact aims to connect young (22-35 y/o) professionals in London who work in the social impact space. Our goal is to provide a casual setting to exchange ideas, build relationships, and collaborate towards social change. Whether you work in social entrepreneurship, education, the charity sector, impact investment, or something different, we look forward to meeting you.

Jangala is a London-based charitable organisation that design and make Wi-Fi systems to provide connectivity to those displaced by natural and man-made disasters. In 2015, Jangala made the first and only wifi network in the Jungle, the refugee camp in Calais, providing internet to over 5000 people a week. In 2018, they equipped 16 grassroots groups across 3 continents with their first product Big Box. In 2019, their aim is to distribute 100 more systems. Angus joined Jangala back in November to lead strategy and business development. His talk will discuss what brought Jangala together back in Calais, how he came to join and what they have planned for the future.

Social Finance is a London-based social enterprise that aims to deliver social change through innovative mechanisms such as its social investment model, the Social Impact Bond, now scaled across 24 countries, and its Impact Incubator which has incubated unique responses to difficult issues such as domestic violence and refugee integration. Tanveer is an analyst at Social Finance who will speak about the Impact Incubator’s Black Thrive initiative which aims to reduce inequalities in mental health outcomes in the black community in London.

Pivotal Act is a program that partners with humanitarian organizations and nonprofits to identify, design, and develop practical technology solutions to pressing challenges around the world, born out of San Francisco-based software and design org Pivotal. Aly and Ellie are associate directors at Pivotal Act and will talk about the projects they’ve run. These include finding ways for NGOs to share data during emergency responses for distributing cash aid, improving the design of toilets in refugee camps, creating a tool to support young people in foster care, and designing for climate change resilience in coastal cities. With a background in Industrial Design, Systems Thinking and Service Design, Aly is passionate about designing products and services that addresses social and environmental issues. Ellie comes from a product management background and has has worked on developing technology to make social impact from an international development angle at the World Bank and with private sector startups.

Note: This will be the first event held by Gen:impact. There will be some light snacks and drinks available, but please BYOB!

The financially driven, capitalist economy works as it does by design. Money is created by banks as interest bearing debt and serves the interests of the few over the many. Money, as it has been designed, is the core driver of environmental destruction, global warming, inequality and poverty.

If we are going to escape the multitude of systemic issues which plague our planet the monetary system has to change.

Since revolution is unsafe, and reform has been proved ineffective, we need to implement new systems of exchange which out-evolve capitalism. A money system that serves our needs better is not only possible, but is already in operation - it’s known as mutual credit.

The challenge is to refine, scale and integrate the various mutual credit systems so they can support a saner global economic system for people and planet.

The event is for anyone with an interest in the evolution of money and will focus on how mutual credit networks are beginning to build a new, alternative financial system known as the Global Credit Commons.

In an exclusive round table discussion we will hear from:

Thomas Greco, author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, who, for more than 35 years, has been working at the leading edge of moneyless exchange systems, community currencies, financial innovation, and community economic development - and is on a rare visit to the UK from Arizona.

Representatives of the Open Credit Network, a new UK co-operative mutual credit network made up of businesses who have come together, under a simple shared agreement, in order to trade with each other without the need for hard cash.

Join the Center for Innovative Governance Research for a discussion about charter cities, effective altruism, and their plan to lift ten million people out of poverty.

Charter cities are cities with special jurisdictions which give them a blank slate, or close to it, in commercial law. The new jurisdiction allows them to adopt the best practices in business registration procedure, labor law, tax administration, commercial dispute resolution, and more. By adopting governance systems which encourage trade, investment, and entrepreneurship charter cities create the conditions for decades of economic growth. Examples proto-charter cities include Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, whose successes demonstrate that it is possible for cities to achieve prosperity in 2-3 generations.

Executive Director Mark Lutter and Communications Lead Tamara Winter will be on hand throughout the night to say hi and answer your questions. Whether you’re interested in discovering just what exactly charter cities are or are a skeptic, they’d love to meet you.

Are you an experienced coder, tester or designer that wants to contribute your skills to a socially and ecologically transformative project? Are you new to software and want to join a project that will help you develop your skills? Do you hate a series of vague questions attempting to lure you into something before you know enough to be excited?

Then read on!

The Open Food Network are thrilled to announce our first ever UK Hackathon. Over the weekend of the 4th and 5th of May we’ll be nestling into Newspeak House to spend two days working on real issues for the global open source project. Together we hope to expand our exciting community, bring in new people that believe in what we do and share our experience in building a successful remote open source community. And of course we will share great food, laughs and fun!

What is the Open Food Network?

The Open Food Network (OFN) is a global, open source collaboration building software for short and local supply chains. We want to make it easy for people to build vibrant and viable communities around the production and distribution of healthy, sustainable food. Our open source platform is used in a dozen countries by hundreds of food enterprises, selling millions of pounds of good food every year. Our global team is built of about 25 people around the world, working on product, dev, testing, UX and support. OFN is growing fast and are hoping to expand our community of passionate food tech enthusiasts.

What to Expect

Over the weekend you will:

Work in teams to tackle issues that are affecting sustainable farmers and community food projects all over the world

Wikimedia UK is organising the second London Wikidata meetup. If you’re working on Wikidata projects, or interested in Wikidata and want to find out how to get involved, come along and talk to us about it.

As this will take place in the downstairs part of Newspeak, there will be an opportunity for brief presentations. If you have a Wikidata project you’re working on and would like to do a 5-10 minute presentation on, please contact me about it - john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk

This event will not be catered, but you are welcome to bring your own food or drink into the venue.

The Race Beat is a network for people of colour, open to anyone working in, or interested in, journalism.

At the April meet up we will talk about our plans for 2019, including day long training events in London and Glasgow, as well as panels at summer festivals. Bring ideas for who you would you like to see speak at our events this year - writers, editors, broadcasters. Are you a journalist who could offer some training? Do you want to get involved with organising or have access to event space?

It will also be a chance to chat and get to know people of colour who are interested in the media. Some of us might also have a drink afterwards.

This is a space for people of colour only. We welcome queer and trans people of colour and all other identities. You don’t need to be a professional journalist.

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available structured data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and helping with a new approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science and innovation.

Over the course of our hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

Collectives are everything, from the cells of our bodies and brains to the groups, nations, and ecosystems we are part of. Are there principles that characterise collective intelligence across scales? Have the factors that lead to human group performance been accurately measured? How do flocks of birds or swarms of bees make collective decisions, and are there lessons in them for human groups? When are crowds wise and when are they stupid? Can technology improve collective decisions? If so how, and by how much?

Drawing on research from academia, corporate performance optimisation, and group decision technology, we’ll dive into the knowns and unknowns of collective intelligence and see where they lead.

We’ll start with an interactive presentation on some of the key findings on collective intelligence from psychology, biology, ecology, and elsewhere.

Then, we’ll take the research out of the journals and experiment with it, using conversational games, human swarming, voting by convergence, and other experiments to test our real-world sensitivity to collective intelligence principles and how they appear (or don’t!) in the groups we’re part of.

Throughout, we’ll tap the collective’s intelligence about collective intelligence with reverse Q&A, discussion, and experimental group decisions about the flow of the event.

“Data everywhere, how we got to this point.” - Ben van Enckevort @benvan87, CTO of Metomic, will be talking briefly about the state of data on the web and how we got here. He promises he will only mention Facebook three times.

Since becoming Lord Mayor of Sheffield in 2018, Magid ‘Magic’ Magid has taken the political scene by storm, making headlines in the UK and across the world. A former child refugee, Magid is Sheffield City Council’s first Green Party mayor and its youngest at 29. His monthly campaigns have reached millions of people online and have touched upon a wide range of issues including knife crime, climate change, Brexit, and the NHS.

Areeq Chowdhury (Chief Executive, WebRoots Democracy) will be in conversation with Magid and will be delving into his journey from Somali refugee to one of the most engaging young politicians the UK has ever seen. In particular, we will be exploring his methods for “doing politics differently”.

How urgent is the need to take serious action over the threat of what some are calling “climate catastrophe”? What are the factors that prevent sufficient attention being given to this topic? And what are the best methods to overcome this state of learned ignorance, and to advance practical solutions?

In this half-day training, we will focus on the foundation of every collaborative team: how to communicate effectively and deal with conflict in a productive way.

We’ll look at the appropriate use of digital communication tools, understanding how different tools suit different jobs. We’ll examine typical reactions to conflict, and how to choose the right response when conflict arises. We’ll explore how to give good feedback and improve your listening skills.​

You’ll leave with processes your team can use to address conflict, and practice the skills that will make you a more effective communicator.

This workshop is ideal for groups working with less hierarchy and more collaboration: cooperatives, self-managing teams, startups, Teal organisations, Agile squads, innovation units, flat NGOs… if you’re growing a participatory culture of shared leadership and mutual accountability, this training is for you.
​
Our knowledge is rooted in our lived experience in our own organisations at the forefront of collaborative work practice. We bring examples from different groups around the world, as well as research from academic studies. We host participatory learning exercises for participants to reflect on how these lessons apply in their group context.

The Hum is Nati Lombardo and Richard Bartlett. We have been immersed in decentralised organisations since 2011, playing co-leadership roles in the Loomio tech co-op and the Enspiral network of social enterprises. For the past 3 years, we’ve been travelling the world sharing our experiences, and learning with others about non-hierarchical management. We’ve worked in 17 countries, with a huge diversity of organisations across all sectors.

We’re offering a 20% discount for “early bird” tickets, purchased before March 20th. This training is even more effective when multiple people from the same team can join. If you have 3 or more people coming together, contact us for a group discount.

On the 5th of April, each council will release a document called a Statements of Persons Nominated, which details the candidates for the upcoming local elections. We need to manually enter this information into a database so that more useful things can be done with it. Come and help!

Trajectory Theatre brings together the brightest minds in the XR community for an evening of debate and discussion.

The first in the ‘Trajectory Talks’ series will explore the nuances of a topic that has long fallen into platitudes and empty conjecture.

Does the answer to broadening audiences for XR lie with content, or technology? It’s a challenging binary choice, but it’s also potentially limiting.

We’ll unpack the arguments through lively discussion to reach a collective understanding of what a successful content-driven ecosystem looks like.

Four people from across the arts and tech space will frame the discourse, before we open up to a ‘fishbowl’ discussion where everyone has the opportunity to share their views and experiences. You are all experts, so we’ll hear from as many of you as we can.

Trajectory Theatre are interactive digital performance makers. We produce work for both site-specific physical and virtual spaces. Our interests centre around interpersonal connection, the future of the digital era, and challenging notions of reality through perception. To get in touch please reach out on Twitter, Instagram or email us at connect@trajectorytheatre.com.

This training explores how we make group decisions when there’s no top-down command-and-control structure.

You’ll learn different decision-making protocols, like consensus, consent, and the advice process. We’ll unpack the neuroscience of cognitive biases, and how to de-bias your decisions. And we’ll investigate how digital tools can help you make collective decision more efficiently.

This workshop is ideal for groups working with less hierarchy and more collaboration: cooperatives, self-managing teams, startups, Teal organisations, Agile squads, innovation units, flat NGOs… if you’re growing a participatory culture of shared leadership and mutual accountability, this training is for you.
​
Our knowledge is rooted in our lived experience in our own organisations at the forefront of collaborative work practice. We bring examples from different groups around the world, as well as research from academic studies. We host participatory learning exercises for participants to reflect on how these lessons apply in their group context.

The Hum is Nati Lombardo and Richard Bartlett. We have been immersed in decentralised organisations since 2011, playing co-leadership roles in the Loomio tech co-op and the Enspiral network of social enterprises. For the past 3 years, we’ve been travelling the world sharing our experiences, and learning with others about non-hierarchical management. We’ve worked in 17 countries, with a huge diversity of organisations across all sectors.

We’re offering a 20% discount for “early bird” tickets, purchased before March 20th. This training is even more effective when multiple people from the same team can join. If you have 3 or more people coming together, contact us for a group discount.

Innovation is a term we hear a lot in government and the private sector. Innovation is a lot of things. Innovation is emerging technology, new ideas, experimentation, and partnering across sectors. It’s self-driving cars and conversational interfaces and it’s also applying for your first passport online.

We’ll have talks from the GovTech Catalyst team, the head of front-end development at GDS on Progressive Web Apps and more. We’ll hear about what innovation means for designers in government.

The UK government’s Prevent policy places a legal obligation on professionals working with children and families to identify and report children and vulnerable adults at risk of radicalisation. This process can have serious implications for families’ freedom of movement and right to privacy, including restrictions on children travelling abroad under guidance issued by former President of the Family Division Sir James Munby, or removal of children in the family courts according to documentation collated by CAGE in 2018. This is contentious and raises many questions. As practitioners what do we perceive as ‘radicalisation’? Are terms like ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’ adequately defined in law? At what point does ideology place children at risk of serious harm? And in cases related to radicalisation, does secrecy in the interests of national security interfere with the human rights of children and families?

This event is open to social work and mental health practitioners, academics and students. Beginning with a panel discussion, we will explore the impact of the Prevent policy on children and families in social work and mental health practise from multiple perspectives. We will invite practitioners to together for a workshop led by the charity Medact, and share experiences of working within the Prevent policy, the ethical challenges it raises for practitioners, and ways of practising or advocating to uphold the human rights of the people we work with.

19:00 - Welcome/Refreshments

19:30 - Panel Discussion

20.15 - Break/Refreshments

20.30 - Workshop

21.30 - End

Note: The perspectives offered by panellists are their own. They do not represent BASW London, Psychologists for Social Change or MedAct.q

Speakers

Chair: Sumayyah Hart is a BASW London committee member and has held a number of senior roles in children’s services across London, including Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) in Lambeth and Independent Reviewing Officer in Hammersmith and Fulham. Her current positions are Child Protection Advisor and Child Protection Conference Chair for Brent.

Dr. Asim Qureshi is Research Director for CAGE, a London-based advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the ‘War on Terror’. Asim collected evidence from families and published the report ‘Separating Families - How PREVENT Seeks the Removal of Children’ in 2018. The full report can be found here.

Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly is Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick University. Her research focuses on Counterterrorism in the UK and USA and Counter-Radicalisation Policies The Guardian’s coverage of her research into Prevent Duty Safeguarding in the NHS is here and here (also see Ted-X Warwick talk on ‘The Motivations for Terrorism’).

Dr. Tarek Younis is Newton International Fellow at UCL (University College London). His current project is a a community ethnography study of the impact of anti­-radicalisation discourse within healthcare institutions on the recipients and providers of PREVENT policy.

Anna Sekular is a caseworker with PreventWatch, which supports people impact by the Prevent policy to access legal advice and representation.

Workshop Coordinator: Reem Abu-Hayyeh works for the charity Medact, and is set to launch a consultation into healthcare professionals experiences of working within the Prevent policy in 2019. Reem has worked in advocacy and campaigns particularly on social justice issues relating to the marginalisation of BAME and migrant communities in the UK and Europe. In her last role at Maslaha, Reem managed projects focusing on Islamophobia, gender and stereotypes, working primarily with young people.

The sell out corn-based snack event of the quarter is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Who?

ou’re getting a sneak peak at this and we will be unveiling the full line up in the next week or so. We’re thrilled to announce our first speakers though..

Sarah Corbett - Craftivist Collective

Polly Billington - UK100

Bayo Adelaja - Do it Now Now

Kat Sladden - We Huddle

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Hate has gone viral and is destroying our communities. Our world has has become tribal, ‘betrayal’ and ‘treason’ appear daily in social media about even the smallest differences of opinions.

How can we fight this footballisation of politics ?

How can we change Them and Us into our shared community again?

“Learning another language is like having a chance to live another life” this quote is true but learning another language takes a lot of time and are all busy people. Lucky for us, playing a game can be like peeking into someone else’s life. In the space of a few hours we can explore in-depth how native Alaskans live (Never Alone), with a glimpse into how incredibly collaborative culture manages to survive in the harshest of climates, how lack of privacy is turned into strength.

In Where the Water taste like Wine we are faced with unemployment and survival dilemmas from the Great Depression times in US. It has amazing soundtrack and shows live in rural US during the tough period in American history. It also explores the Other, non-urban values.

On The Surface – How to be friends with people who are different? Exploring empathy and feelings for others. A game by Digital Liberties for The Challenge and ISD.

Flash Demo VR from Casto – showing a VR game recreating old environments, alternative worlds that can be explored as a story background- Huddersfield Uni) will be show in the break.

The Problem: Our online filter bubbles (Twitter, Facebook) have a propensity to create rapid polarisation (Paolo Gerbaudo and Jamie J Bartlett), where quickly some Them and some Us emerge, praying on people’s innermost fears, emphasising tribalism and exploiting their insecurities. From polarisation to extremism is only a short hop and as a society we need to search for ways to ‘vaccine’ ourselves against the siren call of hate.

The Challenge: How do game designers create worlds where experience of other world, other lives and unfamiliar cultural context can be experienced by thousands of people in a space of few hours and without the need to learn their language? Can games become our hate-vaccines? How can intense emotional gaming experience convey the subtle and often nuance differences in opinion love, sense of community, sense of belonging and shared history or lack of it. Can we create as powerful games as 12 Angry Men movie was for Human Rights movement in 1960 ?

Join us on 18th March to find how hit games step up are the Force for Good in the world obsessed with hate.

What is holding us back from creating a powerful and inspiring vision for our future? Why do we seem stuck in making minor upgrades to managerial capitalism?

One of the youngest law professors in Harvard’s history at 29, Professor Roberto Unger played a significant role in bringing democracy back to Brazil, served in Lula’s government as a minister and has been called “a prophet” by the famed philosopher Richard Rorty. A key influence and inspiration to Obama he was also one of Obama’s toughest critics, memorably arguing against Obama’s second term.

Unger is the author of several important and groundbreaking works, most recently “The Future of American Progressivism” and “The Knowledge Economy”. For decades, he has been a pragmatic utopian, working to envision a practical path to a radically better future at a time when such political dreams were unfashionable. An outspoken critic of neoliberalism and a prophet before his time, he early identified the ideological bankruptcy of managerial capitalism. Now, at a time when history seems to be proving him right, we should learn all what we can from this pioneering voice.

The conference will be facilitated by Dr Rufus Pollock, economists, technologist and author of the Open Revolution and Dr Liam Kavanagh cognitive scientist and Director of the Art / Earth / Tech institute.

Common Knowledge is a newly founded non profit tech workers cooperative with a mission to support and build infrastructure for grassroots political and community organising.

Join us for an evening debrief and workshop. We’ll be presenting the work done in the last two weeks, the third sprint of work. Then we’ll be putting this in the context of the last six months of the project and deciding next steps.

Since October, we’ve been designing and testing our first product, a political organising and community capacity building platform. This work is aimed squarely at boosting the levels of autonomous organising in the progressive space and grassroots movements, activating a largely passive activist population and decentralising and devolving key community resources currently held by large institutional actors.

March 15th will mark the end of our third sprint. We’d like to invite you down, have a few drinks with us and share in our work and learnings. We’ve interviewed over 70 activists and organisers across London as part of this project so far and are currently testing a range of assumptions we’ve developed from those conversations - that’s a lot of juicy learnings.

Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and snacks will be provided.

The event will be split between a presentation and discussion of our work and a short breakout and group feedback session.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of party activists across the world pound the streets and knock on doors in an effort to mobilise large numbers of citizens to vote for their party of choice.

Get Out The Vote (GOTV) voter mobilisation has become a staple of electoral campaigning, but as new technologies develop and new political forces take root, is there room for improvement?

Join Campaign Lab for the first event in our new series exploring the potential for innovation in electoral campaigning in the UK and beyond.

For our debut event, we’ll be joined by Rudi Shenk, former National Outreach Director of Obama for America, and Matt Goddin, Labour Party organiser for Ilford North, one of the few Labour wins in 2015. Our third speaker is to be confirmed.

During the panel and breakout session we’ll explore current methods and GOTV strategies used by political parties and campaigns in an effort to identify where there is space for innovation and improvement - asking our speakers: in an ideal world, how would you improve the GOTV operation?

Campaign Lab is a community of activists, researchers and technologists working towards a more evidence-based approach to campaigning - outside of this event series we run monthly hackdays and meetups, come join us.

Purpose is central to resilience in organisations, but it’s more than a mission statement. Drawing on academic theory and practical examples, this talk will show how to figure out what an organisation is really working towards and build resilience. It will touch on the relationship between people and technology in organisations, how to understand different people’s perspectives and how to design for changeability.

Dr Eloise Elliott-Taysom is a Product Manager specialising in emerging technology, data and AI. She did her PhD in Engineering at Cambridge University looking at resilience in complex socio-technical systems. Her most recent publication, ‘On the Resilience of Sociotechnical Systems’, can be found in a new book on Systemic Design.

The market for personal data is broken. All of our information is traded behind our backs every day by 3rd parties with whome we have no direct relationship. Misaligned incentive structures ensure our privacy is violated again and again.

How did this happen and what we can do about it? The GDPR gives you powerful new rights, but real world constraints continue to prohibit large numbers of people from exercising those rights.

While the problem may seem unprecedented, it is actually something we have solved many times before. Personal data is just an information good, best thought of as a newspaper we publish about ourselves to be read by AIs. What this means is that, in effect, every person is now an author whose copyright is being infringed. As such, we draw draw important insights into this problem by studying information economics and information law.

In this lecture, we identify the key failures afflicting the market for personal data by examining the history of other types of information goods, including books and music. We examine how societies in the past helped fix these broken markets, how new technologies require regular updates to the rules and regulations governing these markets, and outline our solution to the problem modelled on the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

What does a 15th century publishing guild have to do with this 21st century problem? Join the discussion to find out!

Open to those interested in conflict intervention and reconstruction, the mapathon will try to bring people together through a collective activity of mapping one of the Syrian cities (Daraya) affected by the conflict.

Bring along your laptop and mouse to the mapathon where you will be guided through the process of mapping, and given a summary about our project as a whole. Also, the role of open maps platforms in humanitarian intervention and human rights protection in conflict areas.

Other than being a tool for intervention and protecting property rights for Syrians, this mapathon will be a safe and friendly space where we can get to know each other and explore together what can maps reveal about different areas in Syria and how can they be put on the map for all Syrians.

Part of a multi-stage project that seeks to draw maps for urban cities and areas across Syria based on satellite images available through open mapping platforms. The priority is given to areas which fall under laws and decrees that legalise the confiscation of properties owned by Syrian citizens who fail to claim it, giving the priority to the destroyed properties a result of the conflict. The project will be carried out through multiple mapathons adopting a bottom-up approach which depends on the the participation of volunteers (Syrians and non-Syrians) in the mapping process.

One of a series of bi-monthly socials for those interested in community-led housing.

This month we’re joined by Zarinah Agnew (zarinahagnew.com), a US based neuroscientist and social scientist, and a member of the Embassy Network (www.embassynetwork.com) of ten intentional communities spread over six countries.

Zarinah will give a short talk about their exploring and iterating living methods, and in particular their eight month experiment with forms of governance (embassygovernance.space).

Also present will be members of existing cohousing and coliving communities in London, who will be happy to share their experiences and knowledge. You can meet others who are forming projects, looking for members for existing projects and you can find out about other events, advisers, consultants, funders and other organisations.

The event is free to attend and children are welcome.

Feeling daunted about coming alone? We feel that too sometimes. Send us a message with the words ‘buddy me up’ and we’ll make sure you are welcomed in by one of the group and helped to feel at ease.

Cohousing London is a community-led organisation working to create a network of diverse, inclusive, sustainable and affordable cohousing developments across London: facebook.com/groups/cohousinglondon

An afternoon diving into an open dataset of repair data on electronics to discover what is impeding repairs.

Take part in person at Newspeak House, or participate remotely.

The Restart Project collects data on every repair attempted at their community repair events. That data is used to present insights into the devices and problems found to those who design, manufacture and regulate products in the first place. The aim is to identify the barriers to repair that people come up against, whether it’s lack of spare parts, poor documentation, or simply bad design.

This Open Data Day focuses on computers, the product most frequently brought to Restart Parties. New regulations on the repairability of computers will soon be discussed at EU level. The data may reveal common problems, common (and less common!) solutions, and what are the barriers to repair that should be highlighted to policymakers.

There is data on over 10,000 devices from repair events around the world, and a group of volunteers has fixed over 50% of them, offsetting tonnes of e-waste and hundreds of tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process.

There will be a range of data and research tasks suitable for newcomers and experienced analysts, and tools will be provided for the analysis if required. All you’ll need to do is bring a laptop.

The planet is in ecological crisis: we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event this planet has experienced. Scientists believe we may have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown. This is an emergency.

In this public talk, climate speakers from Extinction Rebellion will share the latest climate science on where our planet is heading, discuss some of the current psychology around climate change, and offer solutions through the study of social movements.

Everyone is welcome and there will be time to ask questions and discuss afterwards. Entry is free.

From the Five Star Movement to Podemos, from the Pirate Parties to La France Insoumise, from the movements behind Bernie Sanders to those backing Jeremy Corbyn, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a new blueprint for political organisation: the digital party.

Paolo Gerbaudo will discuss the transformation of political parties in the digital era, drawing on the argument of his new book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, with scholars and practitioners of digital politics.

In the book Gerbaudo addresses the organisational revolution that is transforming political parties in the time of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Cambridge Analytica. Drawing on interviews with political leaders and organisers, he demonstrates that besides rapidly growing in votes, these formations have also revitalised party democracy, involving hundreds of thousands in discussions carried out on online decision-making platforms.

Participatory, yet plebiscitarian, open and democratic, yet dominated by charismatic ‘hyperleaders’, digital parties display both great potentials and risks for the development of new forms of mass participation in an era of growing inequality. All political parties will have to reckon with the lessons of the digital party.

Paolo Gerbaudo is a political sociologist and the Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London. He is the author of The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (2018), The Mask and the Flag: Populism and Global Protest (2017) and Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (2012).

Since June 2018 we’ve been a busy bunch, the Campaign Lab community has sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, developed scrapers and written parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets. We’ve built a comprehensive UK ward-level election results dataset and begun comparing factors impacting elections across the country.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next hackathon as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Not been to a Campaign Lab meet up before? No problem! Come along to meet politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

All attendees to Campaign Lab HackDays may join future discount data science courses put on specifically for Campaign Lab volunteers - contact us for more information.

Aaron Swartz was a young hacktivist, and co-founder of Reddit, early developer of RSS, Markdown and Creative Commons. He led the campaigns against SOPA and was both an excellent technologist and activist.

He was convicted for mass downloading academic journals from JSTOR from MIT. His final charges included a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison. He hanged himself two days after prosecution.

Let’s come together and remember what happened by watching the documentary about him, The Internet’s Own Boy (available here), and be inspired together by his courage. Afterwards we will have time for chatting.

This month’s theme is health. Whether you lead a healthy life still largely depends on where you are born, your socio-economic class, race, gender and sexual orientation. Given this reality, how do we ensure we all have access to health services? How do we ensure issues that affect the health of marginalised populations (e.g. drug addictions, or tropical diseases) get researched and treated? And, how do we promote healthy habits when our digital lives, increased social isolation and sedentary lifestyles are putting our (mental) well-being at risk? Many radical initiatives are working to tackle these problems. They need our help!

We are inviting organisations working in this area to meet engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to these projects. During the meetup we will run a speed dating session, for organisations to introduce themselves to our engineers.

Those of you familiar with the world of finance know it is a complex world built on trust. Banks and financial institutions are hard at work with how they can win our trust again, and offering options for ethical investment is high on the list. It is a positive development, but also something we need to remain critical about: to what extent can we see ethical investing as a way to make the world a little bit better?

The discussion will be hosted by Eline Hesse, who has spent three years creating Petrol Dollars for a Different Engine, a documentary of her experience researching how to reinvest her portfolio in a sustainable manner. She has spoken to many sustainable investment experts and various bankers raising the question if it is possible to match your ideals with your capital. She would like to start a discussion about the value of ethical investing presently and in the future.

Join us at Newspeak House for a rebellious song sharing workshop. Bring your favourite protest, peace and medicine songs and let’s learn them together in a co-created space.

Whether you want to learn songs to take with you to Extinction Rebellion actions, or you just want to come together with a group of people to create beautiful music you are very welcome. We will start by sharing some XR favourites before opening up the space for new sharings. If you have an instrument that you wish to bring, please do. Otherwise just come with yourself and your voice and you’re ready to go!

Following from this event there will be an open discussion on ethical investment, asking to what extent we can see ethical investing as a way to make the world a bit better.

Our second meetup is themed around the idea of waste. From fast fashion to endless packaging, we are surrounded by the unnecessary. This meetup is about ways to get rid of it.

This could be dematerialisation, sharing, reuse and transformation.

We are inviting organisations working in this area to meet engineers of all stripes (hackers, makers, designers and other technologists) who wish to contribute their spare time and talents to these projects.

Following up from the Human Networks Convergence held in Barcelona in October 2018, a gathering which brought together people from 16 different networks to see how we might experiment and learn together, we are hosting a small gathering in London to continue the conversations on ecosystemic collaboration, systemic change and networks, working on shared challenges.

This will be an open space with a small number of people (10-12) who are working in the areas of ecosystemic collaboration and addressing complex issues that involve a variety of players. The purpose is to exchange insights and learn from each other.

This gathering is organised by Corina Angheloiu (Forum for the Future), Phoebe Tickell (Enspiral) and Manel Heredero (Ouishare). If you can’t attend or think of someone who would be interested in this topic, please feel free to make it your own and invite them.

“If we want to address the complex problem situations that the world is facing, being a smart systems thinker and innovator is not enough. We need to engage in new ways of collaborating that promote continuous, productive and collective learning and innovation. These collaborations require us to learn social skills, build social structures, and adopt attitudes of openness to learning, trust and responsibility, however hard it is to let go of the behaviours and structures that hold us back.” Why being smart is not enough — the social skills and structures of tackling complexity by Mieke van der Bijl

Register for the event. (It’s free, but there’s limited capacity — so we ask you only register if you can actually attend.)

Bring work you want to accomplish. This isn’t a lecture or networking event — you’ll actually be getting your work done at the event.

There will be 20-30 minutes of setup and overview where you’ll learn how to break your work into a more efficient format.

You’ll work in cycles: 30 minutes of focused work followed by 10 minute breaks to analyze, plan the next cycle block, get feedback if desired, and do some brief socializing.

At the end of the whole day, you’ll debrief lessons learned for 10-20 minutes, share lessons with other cool people attending, and call it a day.

Ultraworking has run Work Cycles both virtually via videoconferencing, and live and in-person with thousands of people around the world, including at coworking spaces, top universities like the University of Chicago, at the offices of top companies including YCombinator-backed startups, and at government-sponsored innovation spaces like the Seoul Global Startup Center.

On 16th January 1969, young Czech philosophy student Jan Palach burned himself to death. He did so in protest against the growing indifference of citizens towards the gross injustices of the communist regime. The impact of his act was unprecedented. It changed the course of Czechoslovak history and became a symbol that inspired protesters around the world.

There are many different kinds of sacrifice. What is the meaning of sacrifice today? Is it the right way to protest? What can we learn from the legacy of Jan Palach’s most radical act?

The purpose of this event will be to address these questions. We will discuss the philosophical origins of the idea of self-sacrifice, from Christianity to Buddhism to the New Left. We will hear people sharing their own personal experiences with protest by sacrifice. We will engage in a collective ritual to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Jan Palach’s death.

Help us vectorise Mandate-era maps of Palestine, and learn about open mapping tools

We found archival maps of mandate-era Palestine (from 1923 to 1948), including details of 500+ ethnically cleansed villages and towns. We have made them available through PalOpenMaps.org. Now we are working on extracting the data out of the maps, in order to make them useful and accessible to artists and researchers. All the data that we produce will be freely licensed for anyone to use.

In this event, we will introduce the project, show you how to vectorise historic maps using open mapping tools (OpenStreetMap/osm-seed), and we will spend the rest of the session exploring the maps and vectorising sections of it.

No previous mapping experience is necessary. All you need is a computer, curiosity and a desire to help. Please bring a laptop & mouse if you have one. If not, then you can still help by pairing up with another attendee. The more eyes the better!

This will be a relaxed Sunday afternoon, we will provide light snacks and drinks.

Palestine Open Maps is a project supported by Visualizing Palestine and the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fund.

Insights from the South is a new event format by IDEAS Globally, to create the space for knowledge exchange between London and the Global South. Our theme for this event is ‘Designing for Development’: how can external efforts for development be improved through perspectives from the ground?

Come listen to IDEAS Globally authors present their Insights on key issues in Development today, and have your perspectives challenged by our international speakers - community leaders, business people and artists who connect us with the local reality of each topic. Witness conversations that will change your perspective of development and North-South relations.

IDEAS Insights are short academic briefs written by members of the IDEAS Globally international network, providing thought leadership on development and social enterprise. All IDEAS Globally Insights can be read freely at: www.ideasglobally.org/Insights. They have been viewed over 6,000 times (and counting!). This event will use selected insights as the starting point for deeper discussion of issues in the Global South.

Our Selected Insights authors:

Tamas Katona: “Narratives of Development (Hungary’s Social Enterprise Landscape in Historical Context)”.

Kristina Funk & Alyette de Royere: “Women in Nepalese Healthcare as a Potential for Development”.

We live, socialize and work in communities, with some of our closest friends, families and colleagues. We also live in a world that socializes and reinforces violence. We live in a rape culture where media portrays violence and violation as romance.

Data indicates that most consent violations take place, not in abandoned alley ways by strangers, but by people we know, in places where we are supposed to feel safe. One in four women in north america will be assaulted in their lifetimes, many men also. This affects us all, not just those directly harmed. Families are destroyed, communities are fragmented, workplaces become alienating.

How we do best prepare ourselves for these issues? How do we create a culture that clearly sets the bar for the future society that we wish to live in? How do we create restorative and alternative processes and practices that protect those that are harmed in our communities, and also work to guide, teach and serve those who have done the harm? What do you each want to see, how would you like to be treated should you find yourself on either side of the coin in one of these situations?

Come and join us for a discussion around how we’d like society to deal with these issues and to see if we can take some of these lessons on into our day to day life.

Recent predictions about the future of work point in the direction of an incredibly fluid labour market. We face an increasingly precarious employment-market, where the individualisation of labour — seen as a push towards self-employment, short-term contracts, unpaid internships, and disingenuous forms of non-standard employment — becomes the unhappy norm.

At Newspeak House on 13 December 2018, three leading experts will debate the future of work, unions, and the digital economy.

The much anticipated new, expanded and updated edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps comes with high praise from Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, John Pilger and Ken Loach.

Dr Youssef El-Gingihy is a Tower Hamlets GP at the Bromley by Bow Centre. This book tells the story of how the NHS is being sold off and why you might have to buy private health insurance soon. It contains new chapters on the junior doctors’ strike and the introduction of US style healthcare models of accountable/integrated care. It also has a coda on how we can save the NHS.

Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors’ strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017.

Further, since writing the first edition, Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy found himself stricken with a life-threatening illness and the NHS doctor became the NHS patient. The fight to save the NHS transformed into a fight for his own life.

Now, fully recovered, Dr El-Gingihy returns to his 10 Easy Steps in order to strengthen his original argument on the 70th anniversary of the NHS. Dr El-Gingihy’s insights have never been more vital as our National Health Service continues to be hit by the privatisation of public services.

more onion is an award winning digital agency behind the Campaignion platform, which delivers high-impact digital campaigns and fundraising for progressive non-profits. Come and meet the more more onion as well as fundraisers and campaigners from across the UK charity sector.

Decentralisation is charging ahead, but where to? How do we ensure a decentralised web brings about greater autonomy, privacy, choice? What’s the priority? Which apps work now? What’s in the way for mainstream adoption?

Join us for an evening of decentralized conversation! This month, we’ll host a redecentralized speed dating session: a chance to embark on deep (but short) conversations with those building decentralized apps, or developing decentralized governance models and designs.

In addition we’ll have drinks, pizza and tons of fun!

We encourage you to bring anyone with an interest in decentralization. No prior knowledge required! This movement belongs to all of us!

You can reach us at hello@redecentralize.org, or find us on Twitter: @anoukruhaak, @shevksi

For anyone wanting more context, here’s a blog post on the motivations and values behind redecentralize.org, with suggested characteristics of decentralisation that we should care about (TL;DR distribution of power and how this applies to tech)

This event is open only to Kairos Fellows and specially invited Friends of Kairos.

Kairos UK has partnered with Enspiral to bring you a unique evening, exploring the future of entrepreneurship. Registration is required.

Kairos is a global network of young entrepreneurs seeking to fix broken industries. We are from different continents, verticals and backgrounds but share a desire to leave the world in a better way than how we found it, by sharing our experience, networks and expertise.

Enspiral is a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and freelancers who develop software and practices for global collaboration, and who collaborate together to launch businesses with a social and/or environmental mission. The Enspiral network has been experimenting with new forms of governance, making decisions and collaboratively budgeting together for 8 years.

Life as an entrepreneur can be tough. As Elon Musk says, “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” Long days, constant challenges, learning from failures - and unfortunately a lot of this is often done alone.

But could it be different? Imagine a new kind of entrepreneurship, an Entrepreneurship 2.0, where instead of the focus being on the lone wolf entrepreneur, the focus is on the community, and the ecosystem that supports a start-up into flourishing? This kind of collaborative entrepreneurship throws up some big questions:

How can we come together as entrepreneurs and be stronger?

How could we pool our resources, time and know-how to be larger than the sum of our parts?

What kind of impact could we unlock if we learned to collaborate on a large scale?

Cost: We are asking for a £15 contribution to cover food and drink (beers, wine and soft drinks) for the evening and nothing else. If there is any money leftover after organising, this will be donated to charity.

Dresscode: Casual. The evening will be casual but we may decide to go out in Shoreditch after the event.

Format: There will be drinks, we’ll order in some food, and some light exercises to get to know each other better. There will also be slots for some Lightning Talks - 5 minute talks from the community to share what they are working on, and any problems they need help solving.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Phoebe (phoebe@enspiral.com) or Seth (seth.allen@kairossociety.org).

A huge amount of edible food is wasted and many efforts are being made by governments, companies, charities and community organisations with mixed results. Nick Sellen is hopeful that de-centralized co-operative community organising using open source software can provide a way forward.

Please note that space is limited in the Drawing Room so seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

The internet has democratised speech — it has given everyone a publishing platform. So how can we make sense of this explosion of material?

In this Citizen Beta we talk to Turi Munthe and Jamie Bartlett about the new projects they’re working on that try to do just that.

We’ll be covering whether argument mining can actually map an atlas of ideas or arguments, how knowledge and information is currently stored and how that needs to change, and who will actually benefit from these kinds of tools?

Doors open at 7.00pm, talks start at 7.30pm

Speakers

Turi Munthe. Turi is a VC for Northbase Media. He is most recently the founder of Parli. He is also the founder of Demotix and served as its CEO. Turi has worked as Head for CNN, and at the BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi, Reuters, Sky, you name it. He is a Publisher, Editor, Policy Analyst, Lecturer, Journalist. He has written for The Economist, Slate.com, the FT, the Telegraph, the Nation and many others. He has given lectures on Iran to the Central Communist Party of China, and on erotica to the ICA. His one book is the Saddam Hussein Reader. He studied at Oxford University, the Hebrew University and NYU.

Jamie Bartlett. Jamie is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, where he has become one of the UK’s leading thinkers on politics and technology. He is also author of The People Vs Tech (2018) about the relationship between technology and democracy, Radicals (2017) about political outsiders and best-selling The Dark Net (2014) about internet subcultures, which has been translated into 13 languages. His Ted Talk about how dark net technology is changing the nature of cybercrime has been viewed almost 3 million times.

Since June, together we’ve sourced hundreds of demographic and austerity impact datasets, and made a start on setting up scrapers and writing parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our first full HackDay as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there have been very few contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for a day of politically motivated data science.

Over the course of our new hackdays we’ll be tackling the questions plaguing activists up and down the country, making a real impact on elections and political campaigning right across the country.

Four scientists from across the UK will speak about the battle against Alzheimer’s, cancer and the future of regenerative medicine. We’ll also share the story of Lyrical Science, and our vision for the future of science funding.

You’ll be able to learn more about the state of critical life science research, network with the scientists, celebrate our public launch over drinks, and discover a new way to get involved in scientific discovery.

At Lyrical Science, we help scientists share their inspiring stories and earn research incomes from their public backers. Scientists are often prevented from doing life saving research by funding cuts outside of their control. This event is about how we change that.

We’re a team of early career researchers across the UK and can’t wait to share our vision with you in person. We look forward to welcoming guests from all backgrounds– scientists, science lovers, philanthropists, impact investors, and anyone interested in helping the scientific community gain the support it needs to conduct critical life science research.

Got an idea to make the world a better place but need advice or volunteers? Utopia Forum wants you!

We’re looking to follow the reading groups of Utopia Cafe with a venue for people to plan and work on their projects together. Unlike many planning groups, we’re not focused on one type of politics, or on one sector for transformation. Instead we’re hoping to bring together lots of different projects together to transform society as a whole.

In this first meeting, we’ll be discussing Utopia Cafe and Forum as a project, and then opening up the floor for discussion of various projects. Bring your ideas!

Design Hops are the first step for charities exploring the role of digital in their services. By demystifying technology and design approaches, this free half-day creative workshop builds confidence and motivation to take the next step, as well as focus on what that immediate next step should be for each organisation.

At its heart, data science is a set of tools for turning impenetrable datasets into clear insights & decisions that can help you to achieve your goals. This workshop series will introduce you to several of these tools with the aim of giving you practical skills to take away and immediately apply in your own work.

Part I (Mon 5th): A Crash Course in Coding

The first workshop will focus on learning the Python programming language and related libraries for importing, manipulating and visualising datasets.

Part II (Wed 7th): Dabbling with Data

The first workshop leads straight into Part II, which will cover more advanced data visualisation techniques, creating your own datasets by scraping web pages, and a brief introduction to building your own regression models.

The workshops will be hands-on throughout with code examples and exercises provided to apply what you’ve just learned. We strongly encourage you to attend both workshops if possible as they are designed to run together. There are no pre-requisites other than a laptop and your own curiosity.

Over the last decade, the police, tasked with ensuring our safety, have been so severely defunded that they are unable to help every person, or respond to every crime report. The numbers don’t lie. Over the last 8 years, police funding dropped by 19%, resulting in 20,000 fewer police officers and significantly reduced resources to tackle, investigate and prevent crime.

We can’t magically restore the policing budget, but we can help the remaining officers leverage their police skills by providing the tools and technologies they need to be effective.

While innovation within the police has historically been slow, technology could help overcome a number of obstacles. That’s where you come in.

On 6th November we’re holding our first meet-up at Newspeak House to start building tools for police officers! We welcome software developers, designers and anyone with ideas, critical thinking and problem-solving skills to come along and help out. If you’re not available on the 6th, but you’d like to get involved, join our community to find out more about the projects.

At its heart, data science is a set of tools for turning impenetrable datasets into clear insights & decisions that can help you to achieve your goals. This workshop series will introduce you to several of these tools with the aim of giving you practical skills to take away and immediately apply in your own work.

Part I (Mon 5th): A Crash Course in Coding

The first workshop will focus on learning the Python programming language and related libraries for importing, manipulating and visualising datasets.

Part II (Wed 7th): Dabbling with Data

The first workshop leads straight into Part II, which will cover more advanced data visualisation techniques, creating your own datasets by scraping web pages, and a brief introduction to building your own regression models.

The workshops will be hands-on throughout with code examples and exercises provided to apply what you’ve just learned. We strongly encourage you to attend both workshops if possible as they are designed to run together. There are no pre-requisites other than a laptop and your own curiosity.

Want to learn how to be a Wikipedia editor and improve the quantity and quality of information about underrepresented subjects on the world’s biggest encyclopaedia?

Wikimedia UK is hosting a Wikipedia training workshop at Newspeak House on November 4 on the subject of Middle Eastern Human Rights.

The content and contributors on Wikipedia still do not represent the diversity of our world. If we are going to truly create ‘the sum of all knowledge’, we need to improve the coverage of underrepresented subjects.

Recent global events have highlighted the lack of free and factual media both in the Middle East and about Middle Eastern human rights subjects.

Wars continue to rage in Syria and Yemen, creating untold humanitarian disasters. Authoritarian states silence their critics at home and abroad. Wikipedia allows anybody with an understanding of its rules and guidelines to contribute to a shared understanding of any subject area, and there has never been a better time to increase understanding of the human rights situation throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area.

Wikimedia UK is the charity responsible for promoting Wikipedia in the UK. We aim to increase the diversity of the content and contributors to Wikipedia, and organise training workshops for anybody who wants to take part in our projects.

Come to Newspeak House on Sunday 4th November from 12pm for training from Wikipedia experts and help to improve articles on human rights defenders, violations, laws, events and other related areas.

Decentralisation is charging ahead, but where to? How do we ensure a decentralised web brings about greater autonomy, privacy, choice? What’s the priority? Which apps work now? What’s in the way for mainstream adoption?

So many interesting topics and a key time for the decentralisation movement. Come to Newspeak House to hear about what’s been happening, plan next steps and meet the community!

Dr Youssef El-Gingihy tells the story of how the NHS has been gradually converted into a market-based healthcare system over the past 25 years. This process is accelerating and the very existence of a National Health Service is in danger. He fears that there will not be an NHS as our generation grows old and certainly not for our children - yet the British public remains largely unaware of this and the media, with few exceptions, have failed in their duty to inform them. Youssef’s book, How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps, has been described by Jeremy Corbyn as wonderful and sobering, and has received rave reviews from the likes of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger.

Dr Sonia Adesara is the co-chair of the Young Medical Womens International Association, Director of the 50:50 Parliament campaign, and Communications Director for Doctors For Choice.

Western communities are plagued with divisions; Leavers and Remainers, Momentum and moderates, ‘deplorables’ and ‘the resistance’. This has been called polarisation, and we’re in an era where identities are fractured more than ever before. Pundits and academics have stated that this is terrible for democracies. Populism is on the rise and we no longer believe in facts to make decisions.

But is this the right way to understand politics in the 21st century? To what extent can the concept of polarisation help us design online public spaces, offline forums and structure journalism?

This evening seminar looks to understand the difference between polarisation and disagreement and asks are we truly more polarised now than ever before? And does that matter?

Join us on the 23rd October where we will host a keynote by Alice Thwaite of Oxford Internet Institute and the Echo Chamber Club, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A.

What would happen if we locked 100 people in a complex with access to barely enough food for everyone? What if we made it so only one person had the power to say who could eat what and when? Would such a society always fall into totalitarianism? What simple changes to such a society would make a difference?

We know that power can be structured by simple rules in some societies. Bee colonies have a queen with access to the best food and lays all the eggs. Are there simple rules for human societies? How do people organise themselves politically?

We’ll be investigating questions like these in the workshop using a systems modelling approach. It’s possible to create simulation models on computers where individual ‘agents’ behave and interact according to simple rules. We can then observe and study the artificial societies and political systems that we create.

The workshop will be hosted by Dr John Bryden, a research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London and a fellow of Newspeak House. It will start with a background talk about the topic. Examples of simulation models will be provided to get you started.

You’ll need to bring a laptop and an aptitude for programming. We’re going to be using python, so it would be good if you have python 3, matplotlib and scipy installed.

Since June, together we’ve sourced over 130 demographic and austerity impact datasets, and made a start on setting up scrapers and writing parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next event as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning in the UK.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK. Similarly, there have been precious few attempts to determine the effect of local economic factors such as house prices and austerity on election results and vote share.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re building a repository of publicly available data and models to better understand the 2018 Local Elections, identifying which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to electoral campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for an evening of data gathering.

The rapid rise of the gig economy in recent years reflects a huge shift in the way people work. While greater flexibility has created more jobs and low unemployment, in many cases the low-pay and insecurity of some of these jobs means that workers are worse off.

Over three million people in the UK are now estimated to be in insecure work such as temporary work, low-paid self-employment or working on a zero-hours contract, according to the IPPR Prosperity and Justice report. This is not just a problem of the gig economy. The report argues that this trend has reversed the income gains and employee protections secured over much of the last century.

While policy reform is back in the news (BBC), this event will explore how technology could be used to create better work for flexible and independent workers.

We’re interested in how technology can be used to push back against these trends. We’ll discuss products or services that make flexible work benefit workers, as well as employers. For example by helping independent workers increase their income, access benefits, or have more control over when and how they work.

Speakers include:

Emma Blackmore, Head of Partnerships and Marketing at Gigstr

Kayleigh Walsh, Co-op member at Outlandish, CoTech and member of the Worker Co-op Council

The WorkerTech event series is brought to you by Bethnal Green Ventures and sponsored by Resolution Trust and Accenture. This event is delivered in partnership with Newspeak House, The London College of Political Technologists.

This discussion is aimed at people who have a relatively good understanding of the core concepts of effective altruism and know the basic principles behind global priorities research.

We’ll be discussing what the current gaps may be in global priorities research and if and how we as individuals and a community can do anything to help out, whether that is self directed research or working out which organisations we can support more or even whether individual and volunteer research may be negative.

Some of our most important laws- public safety codes such as building, fire, or electrical codes - are considered the private property of standards development organizations and may only be read at great cost and under conditions set by them. In this talk, Carl Malamud will discuss his 10-year fight to change that situation in the U.S., Europe, and India, including court fights that are ongoing on all 3 continents.

Carl will then discuss the efforts Public Resource, the nongovernmental organization he heads, has undertaken to make other forms of knowledge more broadly available, including works of government and the ongoing fight to free up scientific knowledge for use by students.

Carl Malamud has spent 30 years making government information more broadly available on the Internet. He helped put U.S. court cases, the patent database, non-profit tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service, and the Securities and Exchange Commission on the net. In 1993, Carl created the first radio station on the Internet. He has been a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and is the recipient of the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Carl’s current work is focused for the most part on India, where he is leading efforts to make several important repositories available. He is the author of 9 books, most recently (co-authored with Sam Pitroda), Code Swaraj: Field Notes from the Standards Satyagraha.

The numbers that govern our lives: The Office of National Statistics, new APIs and the stories we tell

There are some numbers which mean more than others. GDP rising, prices falling, the average cost of a house. Numbers tell us stories about the lives people are leading, whether they have jobs, how much they are earning and how that’s changed year on year.

Access to these numbers governs how we understand and tell those stories, and who we hold accountable for the choices that have lead us there.

The Office for National Statistics has done a spectacular job in recent years of moving us to a position where we can do more.

Come to this Citizen Beta to hear about that journey, and how it’s changing the lives of people everywhere.

Schedule

From The Hunger Games to Ready Player One, visions of dystopia dominate contemporary ideas of the future. But is there room for a more hopeful alternative?

At the Utopia Café we explore alternative ideas of the future through the lenses of literature, film, and other media. We also consider how these ideas can be realised.

In our third meeting, we’ll be discussing Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and exploring what the strengths and weaknesses of different types of utopian societies might be. Don’t worry if this is your first meeting as we’ll be focusing on the broad themes of the book more than specifics!

This event is brought together and led by Adam Greenfield in collaboration with Theatrum Mundi

Contemporary society is traversed at every level by the software-encoded rules generically known as “algorithms.” Algorithms determine whether or not we’ll be offered a job, or a loan, or a place at school. They guide the route and mode of transit we take on our way to and from work. They drive the disposition and posture of police on our streets, and if we should happen to run afoul of those police, strongly shape just what it is we’ll experience as we make our way through the criminal justice system. They shape what we wear, what we watch, what we listen to, what kind of answers we’re offered when we ask questions, possibly even who we woke up next to this morning. Together, their field of operation is little short of total.

And yet, for all their tremendous power to condition our life choices and chances, very few of us understand algorithms — neither where they come from, nor how they do their work in the world, nor even necessarily what they are. The aim of this one-day workshop is to trace the material effects of these seemingly immaterial actors from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, and to share what it is we know about their origin, purpose, function and impact on our lives.

For the purposes of this conversation, we have chosen to emphasize three different aspects of our encounter with algorithms: their poetics, kinaesthetics and politics.

By “poetics,” we mean a consideration for an emergent algorithmic aesthetic in art, design, literature and craft, and especially the ways in which algorithmic systems begin to suggest the metaphors through which we explain and contextualize everyday experiences. By “kinaesthetics,” we mean the ways in which algorithms and machine-learning systems capture, understand, represent or condition the human body’s movement through urban space. And by “politics,” we mean the ways in which algorithmic systems condition, constrain or determine collective choice, especially with regard to the allocation of power.

During this day-long working group we will discuss these facets of algorithmic experience. We’re especially interested in the perspective of artists that consciously use the expressive dimension of emergent technologies to communicate experience, as we believe their work plays a critical role in helping a broader public understand the capabilities, implications and limits of the technologies that already do so much to condition our lives.

Agenda

11.15 Session 1 | The Poetics of Algorithmic Culture

Topics to be discussed might include James Bridle’s putative “New Aesthetic”; the legibility (for humans) of spaces and objects designed procedurally/parametrically; the drift into other expressive media of terminology originating in the study of algorithmic systems; and dimensions of the algorithmic sublime and uncanny. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

12.30 Session 2 | The Kineaesthetics of Algorithmic Culture

Here we’ll treat aspects of the algorithmic capture and regulation of bodily experience: techniques of face recognition, gait recognition, etc.; the abandonment of traditional choreographic notation in characterizing the movement of the human body through space, and possible new approaches to doing same; pattern recognition and the characterization of stereotyped human gestures; and crowd detection, crowd-size and footfall analysis, and their use in the design of urban space. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

14.30 Session 3 | The Politics of Algorithmic Culture

By “politics,” we mean the ways in which the systems described and discussed condition, constrain or determine collective choice, especially with regard to the allocation of power. Topics might include decision-support systems; credit-scoring systems and their use as tools of discipline; new modes of association or collective. action based on blockchain technologies; and China’s “social credit” system and its implications for networked authoritarianism elsewhere. Three 10-15-minute presentations and discussion.

16.45 Wrap-up and next steps

In this public talk, Roger Hallam will explain why we are entering a climate apocalypse and show how denial mechanisms stop us from seeing what is now obvious. Based upon his award winning PhD research on effective campaign mobilisation, he will outline the political response necessary to maximise the chances that we will avoid the extinction we are presently racing towards. It doesn’t involve NGOs and governments.

A year ago, Roger organised a rapid 8-week direct action campaign at Kings College which resulted in a commitment to fully divest from fossil fuels. It involved the painting of the central hall of the university for which he was suspended. He then went on a 14-day hunger strike which led to the College agreeing to all the campaign’s demands.

This talk in being held by the Rising Up Network in towns and cities all around the country in preparation for large scale civil disobedience activities in London this November which will call for emergency action on the climate crisis.

Since June, together we’ve sourced over 130 demographic and austerity impact datasets, and made a start on setting up scrapers and writing parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next event as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning.

This coming event we’ll be:

Doubling down on Police cuts in an effort to correlate local crime data, police cuts and local election results.

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?

How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?

What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

Is Article 13 good for musicians or just music labels? Will it usher in a new era of automated Internet censorship or instead help direct royalties to under-appreciated artists? Where do UK political parties stand and why aren’t MEPs voting on strict partisan lines?

Join us for a lively night as we review the current status of the Directive and consider all sides of this important debate.

Are the robots coming for our reporting jobs? How can we augment reporting workflows? What would the automated utopia look like for journalism?

This month, we’re looking at the whole gamut of automation historically used in journalism, and the future promised by AI.

Panel discussion, with:

Bill Thompson, Principal Engineer, BBC Research & Development

Bill has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984, and was Internet Ambassador for PIPEX, the UK’s first commercial ISP, and Head of New Media at Guardian Newspapers where he built the paper’s first website. He helped develop the Labour Party’s internet policy in 1996.

Bill appears regularly on Click on BBC World Service radio and writes for a range of publications.

Mevan Babakar, Head of Automated Factchecking at Full Fact

Mevan leads a tool-building team that scales the work of factcheckers around the world for the UK’s leading factchecking charity. She co-authored the seminal report “The State of Automated Factchecking” in 2016.

« more speakers announced soon»

Chaired by Manisha Ganguly, Director of the Future of Journalism network.

HACK Fear is an interdisciplinary hackathon bringing together technologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, academics, hardware tinkerers, UX, gamers, activists with parkour and mindfulness practitioners to team up and experiment on designing and building out ideas and solutions to hack our own fear and develop our self awareness through technology.

There will be:

Interactive workshops, both physical and non

Intensive hacking sessions where teams work on the design and implementation of a prototype that makes progress in hacking fear

Input and feedback from subject matter experts

Deeper work uncovering and moving past your own fears and shared ones

We welcome coming both solo and as a team. Cross disciplinary teams will be created with the intent to maximise the potential towards successful fear hacking.

Please note: Bring a laptop. The event will be livestreamed and remote listeners will have opportunities to input comments/requests. Inform the organisers if you do not want to be recorded.

The ideas that come out of Fear Hack could contribute towards R&D for the award winning work of Karen Palmer, who is currently in development for RIOT*, an emotionally responsive film which uses facial recognition and A.I. technology to navigate through a dangerous riot.

*RIOT: You are confronted by a riot cop. Respond with fear and the film goes in one direction respond with anger and it goes in another. RIOT makes the player aware of their subconscious behaviour and enables them to consciously build new neurological pathways in their brain, to override automatic behaviour responses and create new ones.

Fashion consumers can make better buying decisions if they can find out whether an item is ethically produced or not. Likewise, transparency along the fashion supply chain allows investors to better understand where their money is going. Ultimately, clear investor information can help manufacturing workers in the global garment industry know who they are working for and how to leverage for better working conditions.

Yet, supply chain and investor information are scarce, scattered and hard to access.

On August 23, 2018, Clean Clothes Campaign, in collaboration with OpenCorporates and WikiRate, invite you to an Open Data Sprint to find out what kind of investor data is publicly available and how we can all start connecting the dots in supply chains.

We will bring together researchers, data analysts, and activists to map investor to company relations in the fashion industry. The focus of the sprint will be on some of the largest companies within the apparel industry, such as HANES, ASOS, GAP, and H&M.

After the research and review session, we invite you to stay with us for a get together.

Follow updates about the event on twitter with the hashtag #InvestorDataSprint

Program:

13:30 - 13:40 Welcoming remarks and introduction

13:40 - 13:50 Learn how to research (Goals, Methods, Process)

13:50 - 14:00 Group settings

14:00 - 15:50 Researching in groups

15:50 - 16:20 Share findings and wrap-up

16:20 - 17:00 Networking and refreshments

Refreshments will be served. Please let us know if you have any dietary requirements.

As this is an interactive event please bring a laptop so you can participate in the research. The event is open to the public but the venue has limited space, so please confirm your attendance by registering.

For decades people wishing to organize in more cooperative ways have been encouraged to make decisions by consensus, and for good reason: when it works well, it’s awesome. However—when it doesn’t work—it can lead to personal guilt, frustration; organizational paralysis or disintegration.

What should we do when consensus can’t be reached? What if cooperative decision-making is better achieved in such cases with practices other than “reaching consensus”? In this talk I will explore how score voting with tweaks can provide a simple, scalable and systematically cooperative alternative to the often utopian ideal of consensus.

Please note, due to space this event is limited to only 15 people. If you aren’t able to come, please cancel your ticket so someone else is able to attend.

Launch of the debut book by Carl Miller, Newspeak Fellow & Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos: “The Death of Gods – the new global power grab”, a ground-breaking journey to reveal the new centres of power and control in the twenty-first century.

The old gods are dying. Giant corporations collapse overnight. Newspapers are being swallowed. Stock prices plummet with a tweet. Governments are losing control. The old familiarities are tumbling down and a strange new social order is rising in their place. More crime now happens online than offline. Facebook has grown bigger than any state, bots battle elections, technologists have re-invented democracy and information wars are breaking out around us. New mines produce crypto-currencies, coders write policy, and algorithms shape our lives in more ways than we can imagine. What is going on?

For centuries, writers and thinkers have used power as a prism through which to view and understand the world at moments of seismic change. This talk will be about Carl’s journey to find the reality of power today. From a cyber-crime raid in suburbia to the engine rooms of Silicon Valley, and from the digital soldiers of Berkshire to the hackers of Las Vegas, he will explain how power – the most important currency of all – is being transformed, fought over, won and lost. As power escapes from its old bonds, he shows us where it has gone, the shape it now takes and how it touches each of our lives.

Get ready to mix and mingle with people working or interested in the tech for good space over a drink or two. You’ll have the opportunity to hear from some tech for good funders and field-builders, and find out who is actively involved in this space.

We’ll kick off at 6.30pm with a short round of introductions of tech for good funders and field-builders, dive straight into community announcements and use the rest of the time to socialise with some quality people in this community.

Registration: We charge £3 (+VAT) to help manage the number of people who show up on the night, which goes towards the cost of running the event. We don’t want this to become a barrier to attendance, so get in touch via Meetup messages or directly with dama@bethnalgreenventures.com if this causes a problem for you.

The #metoo movement spread virally in October 2017 prompting a global dialogue about countering sexual violence and assault. A stream of more localised movements brought more contextual alternatives around the world. Almost a year on, it’s time to reflect. What has been achieved in challenging norms? How do we build on the momentum? What is the role of digital technology in reporting, solidarity and opening dialogue?

Introducing Hollaback! a global, people-powered movement to end harassment. We work together to understand the problem, ignite public conversations, and develop innovative strategies that ensure equal access to public spaces on and offline. Hollaback! are delighted to invite you to an event to unravel strategies and methodologies which are open for civil society to challenge harassment.

Please join us to hear from these incredible speakers in a panel discussion:

Laura Somoggi - Women’s Empowerment Expert at Womanity - Womanity fights for girls’ and women’s empowerment and Laura manages The Womanity Award for the Prevention of Violence Against Women, an international award that supports collaborations to combat gender-based violence.

Manisha Ganguly - Newspeak House Fellow Manisha specialises in investigative journalism and ran a feminist news website and collective in India for five years, including anti-harassment and bystander intervention campaigns

Molly - Hollaback! London Site Leader

Miranda Dobson - Hollaback! Oxford Site Leader Miranda is also Communication Manager at the Orchid Project who have a vision of a world free from female genital cutting

Courtney Young - Board Member, Hollaback and Founder of Think Young Media - a professional storytelling and digital media firm that practices strategic storytelling.

Moderated by Amy O’Donnell - Board Member, Hollaback! and Digital in Programme Lead at Oxfam

Ben Falk will be leading a session getting volunteers to log as many subject access requests as possible, from as many organisations as possible, as a first step towards building a ‘data democracy.’

You will be given instructions on how to request your data from organisations that include the Home Office, the NHS and Facebook, hopefully highlighting how much of your data is available to you, and prompting you to ask the question ‘what do I do with all this?’

Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into Commons. Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome ingrained training and ‘rational’, self-interest maximizing behaviours and instead learn how to cooperate to create a commons-oriented locality. It’s also great fun to play and a good challenge.

We’ll be playing with several boards simultaneously, which will make for a lively game. Apart from enjoying a fun and thought-provoking board game, we’ll also be chatting about commoning, radical politics, collaboration and much more in the context of the game.

From The Hunger Games to Ready Player One, visions of dystopia dominate contemporary ideas of the future. But is there room for a more hopeful alternative?

At the Utopia Café we explore alternative ideas of the future through the lenses of literature, film, and other media. We also consider how these ideas can be realised.

Join us for our second meeting as we discuss Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and sketch out what we think Utopia could look like. Don’t worry if you haven’t attended before: we try to just use the book as a starting point for much broader debates!

If you are trying to organise in a decentralised, collaborative, less-hierarchical team, you are probably asking yourself: How do we include people in decisions without spending so much time in meetings? How do we develop an open, collaborative culture? How do we encourage participation, engagement, and shared responsibility? And if nobody is in charge, where does accountability come from?

You are not the only one. For the last decade, we have been immersed in these challenges, as we co-founded and built Loomio and Enspiral, two pioneering decentralised organisations. (Read more about us here.)

Everyone seems to face the same challenges when we try to work without a traditional command-and-control structure. The good news is: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel! Many of us have found solutions, and we are here to guide you along the way.

In this Masterclass we will share with you 14 Patterns for Decentralised Organising. These patterns are like lenses for understanding the challenges of working with less hierarchy, and the practical responses that have proven to solve them.

Through this full day of participatory learning, you’ll not only gain new understandings, connections and fresh perspectives. You’ll leave the workshop with practical actions that you can start applying right away, to grow a purpose-driven team environment that feels nourishing, engaging, hugely productive and resilient.

Last year, 46 journalists were killed. 262 currently remain incarcerated. In the wake of the Capital Gazette shooting and attacks on journalists by governments and the far right around the world, how are we to safeguard journalists in the field physically and digitally from harm?

For this chapter of Future of Journalism, we’re threat-modelling the future of journalists.

It’ll kick off with lightning talks by:

Rebecca Vincent, the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders/Reporters sans frontières (RSF), which works to promote and defend press freedom around the world. Rebecca is a former US diplomat, with more than 13 years of experience working on human rights and freedom of expression.

Colin Pereira, Risk and Safety strategist for the Committee to Protect Journalists, supporting journalists and orgnaisations in the field through both physical & digital safety. Colin will be discussing far right threats, which start off as a digital threat and can have physical security issues.

Dr Ala’a Shehabi, activist and co-founder Bahrain Watch, a research and investigation collective. Ala’a is former policy analyst at Rand Europe. She has faced arrest while working with journalists in the field.

This is a workshop for people already exposed to the general idea of Ethics in Mathematics, have some intuition for the need for it, and who are keen to figure out how progress can be made in this area.

The workshop will be small, 10 - 15 people, and is by invitation only. It is mostly for people who have done or are doing mathematics or something adjacent, whether in industry or not. Maurice Chiodo, behind CUEiMS will be joining us.

The workshop will focus on imagining and defining what good looks like, after which we will come up with instrumental goals to get there. We will be identifying who in the room can help with what: from just offering ideas, to taking actions.

Suggested Reading

P.S. thanks to everyone in the community who did the quick feedback poll last week - We’re doing this event because it was your top voted topic! If you’ve not done the poll yet, have your say here: Survey

The sell out corn-based snack event of the quarter is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Wot Wot Where?

We are lucky to be back at our regular venue, Newspeak House (big thanks to them for hosting)

Wot Wot Who?

Esther Foreman, Social Change Agency

Mike Harris, 89up

Beth Knight-Yamamoto, Citizens Advice

Helen Gravestock, Clic Sargent

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Land Explorer is our interactive online mapping platform that provides access to information on land; such as use, ownership and planning. We’ve been improving and updating our initial prototype and are ready to launch our latest BETA version!

We’d love the pleasure of your company, so come and celebrate with land professionals, policy folk, public servants, data geeks, and common good land users.

Our aim is to provide community groups, charities and not for profit businesses who manage land for public benefit, with access to the information they need, so everyone has easy access to information about the land around them.

Even in an age of increasingly open data, finding information about land can be time consuming, complicated and costly.

Developers and corporate landowners who purchase and develop land for private profit have the resources to do this but communities, and those seeking to own and manage land for the common good, often can’t access the same information.

Land Explorer has been created in response to this, utilising recently opened up MasterMap data from Ordnance Survey, and a range of other open data, to empower communities and enable more land to be managed for the common good.

Land Explorer helps to level the playing field for community-led development: housing, workspaces, green spaces, energy generation and rural or farming enterprises.

On June 13th we ran our first Campaign Lab, together we sourced over 90 demographic and austerity impact datasets, and made a start on setting up scrapers and writing parliamentary questions and FOIs to source the more hard to get datasets.

But we’re not finished yet. Come and join us for our next event as we continue to build the case for an evidenced-based approach to electoral campaigning.

What is Campaign Lab?

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?

How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?

What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

In 2008 mySociety’s Freedom of Information platform WhatDoTheyKnow.com was born.

10 years on, the site is the biggest online archive of Freedom of Information requests in the UK, and has over 6 million visits a year.

With 130,144 users making over 480,000 requests, the site has helped millions of people to get the information they need to understand the workings of public authorities, and to hold them to account.

WhatDoTheyKnowPro, a new powerful toolkit which provides extra functionality for journalists and other people who use FOI in their jobs, has also just been launched.

Now all of that is a reason to celebrate!

mySociety will host an evening of drinks, nibbles and presentations to reflect on the last 10 years, and to look forward to what the future holds for WhatDoTheyKnow.

As spaces are limited, this event is by invitation only and you must present your invitation on arrival. To request an invitation, please email gemma@mysociety.org and she’ll let you know if spaces are available.

Turkey goes to the polls for a snap election, both presidential and parliamentary, on 24 June. In a rare move, Turkish opposition have largely united against President Erdoğan who could be at risk of losing parliamentary majority. And if no presidential candidate wins 50%+ of votes on June 24, the election will go to a second round in July.

Head over to Newspeak to watch the Turkish election results come in (English broadcast) as we eat, potluck style. Bring a Turkish dish to share if you can, and of course, BYOB.

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

In the fourth session we will discuss platform companies. The data that platform companies collect gives them unique advantages but can also make their operations traceable. What opportunities for intervention does this open, and what does “scraping” reveal about platform capitalism? For inspiration for the discussion, we suggest a number of readings and data sources, focused on creative ways people have studied AirBnb.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi for more information if you’d like to take part.

Sarah Meiklejohn is a Reader in Cryptography and Security at University College London. She has broad research interests in computer security and cryptography, and has worked on topics such as anonymity and criminal abuses in cryptocurrencies, privacy-enhancing technologies, and bringing transparency to shared systems.

Ben Laurie is the head of security and transparency at DeepMind in London. He was a founding director of The Apache Software Foundation, a founder of OpenSSL, a member of the Shmoo Group, a director of the Open Rights Group, Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting and spent 10 years in Google’s security team. He is a software engineer, protocol designer and cryptographer.

Ben has worked on Certificate Transparency at Google, and on Verifiable Data Audits at DeepMind Health using blockchain technology.

A Roundtable on Political Psychology at Newspeak House with Lee de-Wit (University College London).

Registration by invitation only.

Agenda

18:30 - 19:00 Networking and arrivals

19:00 - 19:15 Dr de-Wit opening with a short talk

19:15 - 20:30 Roundtable facilitated discussion

20:30 - 21:00 Open discussion

Lee’s talk

This discussion will review key findings in the psychology of politics from the last 10 years. This research has discovered a range of individual differences between voters with different political leanings (including different moral values, different personality profiles, and different patterns of neural activity), and more recently individual differences in cognitive flexibility between Leave and Remain voters in the UK’s Brexit referendum.

These differences will be explored in relation to claims that this ‘psychological profiling’ can be used to effectively target different voters (in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal). Following that Lee will explore some recent findings from my own research that seeks to test for underlying differences in psychological beliefs and cognitive styles that might help to explain divergent opinions on political polarised topics like immigration and inequality.

Lee is a Teaching Fellow at UCL in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences. He has recently published a book on the psychology of voting with Elliot and Thompson exploring the biases we bring to the political process.

Thousands of activists across the UK volunteer their time and energy for electoral campaigns every year. Year in, year out, we use the same campaigning methods and tools we always have, because we think they work.

But there has never been any contemporary analysis or studies undertaken to assess the impact or value of electoral campaigning methods in the UK.

So, if no one else has done this, then maybe it’s about time we started?

We’re planning to build a repository of publicly available data and develop a model to better understand the 2018 Local Elections and identify which results bucked the national political and demographic trends. These are areas in which local campaigning may have actually made a difference and where we can start learning and testing.

This is about developing an evidence-based approach to campaigning.

But we need your help.

To create these insights we need to identify as much publicly available demographic and political data sources as possible.

So if you’re interested in chipping in and developing a new data-driven approach to understand what actually goes on in elections and campaigning, bring your laptop and join us for an evening of data gathering where we’ll be asking:

What existing data sources are already structured at a ward level?

How can we transform data that is not at a ward level into data that is?

What data is missing and how can we use Parliamentary Questions and FOIs to access it?

Join us for the launch of Rufus Pollock’s new book Open Revolution – New Rules for a New Age

Forget everything you think you know about the digital age. The simple truth is that it’s not about privacy, AI or blockchain—it’s about the rules. And hope lies in the fact that we can change them in a radically better way.

Will the digital revolution give us information democracies or information empires? The answer lies not in technology but in a political choice: a choice between making information Open, freely accessible to all, or, making it Closed, exclusively owned and controlled.

In his provocative book Dr Rufus Pollock, founder and president of Open Knowledge, challenges our preconceptions about how the digital age work and its impact on our world.

Open Revolution shows us the source of the increasing inequality and stunted innovation that comes with building our digital age on outdated rules. It offers a solution for how to reboot those rules on a more equal and innovative basis.

North Korea has been directly involved in a wide array of global cyber attacks, including an attempt to steal $1bn from the New York Federal Reserve, the WannaCry ransomware attack, and the Sony hack. Trump is now under pressure to confront North Korea about its aggressive hacking strategy alongside nuclear security issues.

On the night before the historic Trump-Kim summit*, Newspeak House hosts a drinks & discussion evening with Evans J.R. Revere, retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2007 as the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Currently Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the The Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, Revere has also served as the president of the Korea Society and has extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea

The event is hosted by Ekin Can Genç, a Resident Fellow at Newspeak House and an incoming postgrad student at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Ekin is a policy consultant and has a background in international politics through work in Brussels, London, Istanbul and Washington, D.C.

Jules Giraudat, deputy editor of Forbidden Stories, that allows journalists under threat to securely back up their work, so the network can continue the work if something happens to them.
Jules is coordinating the Daphne Project, continuing the work of murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on corruption and money laundering, through a global collaborative investigation of 18 news organizations and 45 reporters from 15 countries.
(@JulesGiraudat), (@FbdnStories), (@DaphneProject)

Nick Waters, investigative journalist for BellingCat, that uses collaborative techniques with open source information to conduct investigations such as the downing of MH17, Russian airstrikes in Syria, and the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Nick has investigated the bombing of Damascus’ water supply and specialises in tracking the Islamic State’s drone program using open source information.
(@N_Waters89), (@Bellingcat)

Jack Barton, journalist for WikiTribune, a publication founded last year by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, to pair the crowd-sourced strengths of Wikipedia with the skills of professional journalists.
Jack focuses on international law and corruption.
(@jackbarton91), (@WikiTribune)

Maeve McClenaghan, investigative journalist for Bureau Local, that works with local reporters to dig into datasets and publish over 220 exclusive investigative stories in partnership with over 50 local national and international media outlets.
Maeve is part of the Bureau Local team, and founder of the award-winning podcast The Tip Off which aims to demystify the inner-workings of investigative journalism.
(@MaeveMCC), (@BureauLocal)

What does it mean to be a citizen in the digital age? What common things do we care about and want to tackle as a group? Those are the questions we’re asking people all over the world through our global inquiry into citizens in the digital age.

We kick things off in London where The Fourth Group will host a public conversation. It’s really simple: Join us, engage in debate, meet new people, be part of a movement.

This year The Fourth Group (in partnership with UCL and the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network) is running an inquiry to learn what people want, problems they want to sort out and what actions they want to take in regards to the fourth industrial revolution. To this, we are hosting conversations in every region of the world, and giving everyone the opportunity to engage through our online survey. After listening, we will develop an agenda of issues and solutions which will be launched at Politics Summit 2018 in London. This agenda will form the basis of The Fourth Group’s actions in 2019 and beyond.

Join us at our 2nd WorkerTech meetup - an event for anyone interested in the future of work, and using technology to improve the prospects and power of workers.

“The opportunity for tech-led, pro-worker innovation are many, but there are just too few people pursuing this agenda. That’s what we want to change.” - Gavin Kelly, CEO Resolution Trust

We want to bring together a community of people who can help spread, use, develop, fund and support new WorkerTech solutions. For example, these could be tools that help workers organise and increase bargaining power, boost skills and pay and curb insecurity.

Join us for drinks, talks and networking from 6.30pm at Newspeak House.

If you’d like to speak about an initiative or demo a product on the night then get in touch: jessica@bethnalgreenventures.com

We look for a wide range of initiatives: from thought-provoking artworks, to alternative financial models and from cooperatively run factories, to tools for collective decision-making. We welcome projects that aim to instigate change and last until they achieve their goal, as well as those designed to survive the long haul. Our program is especially suitable for projects that hope to grow out of the idea phase.

Come on down to the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain’s #DeliverJustice party - raising money for our campaign to end Deliveroo exploitation.

Imagine putting your health at risk to deliver something as banal as a pizza. As absurd as it sounds, this is the reality faced by many Deliveroo couriers, who force themselves to make deliveries in snow, sleet and rain, just to earn enough to get by. By taking advantage of legal loopholes the company is able to deny these workers basic rights such as the right to a guaranteed minimum wage, holiday pay and trade union rights.

Abandoned by their employer and abandoned by the government, a courageous group of Deliveroo couriers decided to come together and fight back. First unionising with the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and then launching a ground-breaking legal challenge against this food delviery behemoth, these young couriers proved that nobody is too small to take on the powerful.

But now, they need your help. While their legal challenge established the overwhelming desire of the couriers to collectively bargain for their rights, Deliveroo was able to win by inserting an eleventh-hour legal loophole into its contracts. Now, these couriers, backed by the IWGB and armed with a crack legal team including legendary trade union barrister John Hendy QC, are taking Deliveroo on in the High Court.

On 12 June our lawyers will be going to the High Court to overturn a decision preventing the couriers from appealing the case. This case could have massive consequences not only for Deliveroo couriers, but for all workers in the so-called “gig economy”. Winning will create a major precedent that could stop future companies from exploiting workers the same way Deliveroo does, but defeat, could push back a number of earlier victories and put us back years in terms of employment rights.

The potential cost liability is in the tens of thousands and the IWGB, a grassroots union for low-paid and precarious workers, has already been saddled with a £10,000 legal bill by Deliveroo’s lawyers.

Despite the company’s attempts to scare us out of taking action by landing us with legal costs, we are determined to fight back. That’s why we are asking for £50,000 to cover these and any future costs. Any money that isn’t spent will go into the IWGB’s fighting fund, to take on other exploitative companies. With your help we will make sure the courts #deliverjustice.

There’s no reason why we have to allow this multi-billion pound company to bring Victorian work practices into the 21st century. We need your help to push back against the financial might of this company that can spend millions fighting our legal challenge, so please share and donate.

Digital and design principles are a well established concept across the tech and startup worlds, and there are already some great sets being used by some of the most digitally mature charities. The Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology (CAST) has conducted research over the last four months into how charities use principles to design and deliver better digital services.

Together with dozens of nonprofits and grant-makers, they’ve developed a new set of principles specifically designed to align with the needs, language and practice of the UK social sector. These provide clarity on what ‘good’ looks like when developing digital services, to help nonprofits and funders ‘build the right thing in the right way’, whatever stage they’re at.

This event will see the launch of the first version of the principles. Over breakfast, we’ll hear from charities about how they’ve used these principles and the impact they’ve had within their organisations, as well as from funders on why the principles are important to them. We’ll also discuss the future of these principles and how we can engage the sector in their evolution.

Please note - these digital design principles are designed specifically for nonprofits and their funders, so while they will also be relevant to other types of organisation, this event is primarily intended for those two groups and individuals/organisations that support them.

If you’re unable to attend in person, we’ll be livestreaming it on the Tech for Good Facebook page - simply tune in here at the start of the event: https://www.facebook.com/techforgood/

The digital land data team are a new team at the ministry for housing communities and local government. We’ve been set up to help make it easier for people to access the data they need about land and housing. We’re holding an open meeting at Newspeak House so that anyone can drop in and ask us questions about data, tell us the data they need and the problems they have.

We will:

show what we’ve done so far

discuss what data people need

support people to navigate the existing datasets

One way we think the digital land data team can help is to make it easy for different people to find the information they need when they make the decision to move house, build houses or plan local policies. We know that information about land and housing is hard to find, hard to use and hard to reuse. We’d like to make this better.

We’ve found roughly 300 existing datasets, published by around 400 different public sector organisations and done some work to tidy them up. Now we’re leaving the office and asking you to help us work out:

When you hear words like civic tech and open data, we tend to think about shiny websites and csv downloads. But there is nothing necessarily modern or digital about civic tech.

Citizen Beta, History & Policy and mySociety have worked together to bring you historians with perspectives from different points over the last few millenia where technology has changed the relationship between the citizen and the state.

OpenAI’s Jack Clark (@jackclarkSF) is visiting from San Francisco and will give a talk on “Policy puzzles: Openness, Measurement, and Malicious Actors”.

Jack will talk about how the open, rapid development norms of the AI community mean that the technology poses unique opportunities and threats to policymakers.

Some of the opportunities include figuring out ways for governments and other organizations to measure and forecast progress of AI-related technologies to better prepare society for its changes, and learning how to use the open development nature of the AI ecosystem to maximize the number of people that can participate in its development.

Some of the threats include the rapid proliferation of powerful AI capabilities via the open ecosystem leading to the arrival of new threats and the enhancement of existing ones, as discussed in the recent multi-stakeholder Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report (PDF).

He will also discuss ways that the AI community in London can become more involved in these and other policy debates and would love to do a Q&A and discuss ways to develop grassroots policy movements in London for AI issues of interest to the attendees.

About Jack Clark

Jack is the strategy and communications director for OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company whose goal is to ensure that powerful artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity - both through direct technical work and through analysis of its impacts.

He writes a weekly newsletter about cutting-edge AI research and applications called Import AI, which is read by more than ten thousand experts around the world. He has given numerous talks about artificial intelligence and its impact on policy, ethics, and security.

He also helps run the AI Index, an initiative from the Stanford One Hundred Year Study on AI to track and analyze AI progress.

Transition Towns are about people in communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world. There are 30+ Transition Towns inside the M25 and 250+ across the UK, not to mention the thousands around the world.

Over the last 2 years, the London Hub has been connecting Transition Towns to share, support and celebrate actions on environmental, social and economic sustainability by local folks for their communities. We also look across and out to build a larger narrative and connect with other organisations as well as develop the infrastructure and communications to make the hub super useful to Transitioners and others.

You’re welcome to come along to the meeting in which we will:

share what’s going on in our respective groups in an opening go-round

respond to the needs and interest of those attending, leaving space for that which emerges

work on a project to connect with other Hubs around the world, share learning and best practice

open a discussion about a London wide event to build a movement for sustainability suggested for Autumn ‘18/Winter ‘19

share an invitation to connect with a Community of Practice about work with refugees and asylum seekers from Transition Town Tooting

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a monumental piece of legislation, the ramifications of which we are only beginning to understand.

Join us to learn about your new and strengthened rights as a consumer over the data that organisations store about you including:

Your Right of Subject Access - get a digital copy of all your data from any organisation in the EU, including retailers, websites, hardware and device makers, government agencies, educational institutions, and many more!

Your Right to Withdraw Consent to Processing - tell organisatins you no longer consent to them analysing or selling your personal data

Your Right to Erasure - also known as the “right to be forgotten” exercise your right to delete sensitive personal information from 3rd party servers

Your Right to be Informed - ask for an explicit elucidation for what your data is being used and to whom it is being sold

Your Right to Rectification - correct any inaccurate or misleading data no matter where it sits

Following the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, these rights are more important than ever because in a world where AI is ubiquitous, data is power. Understand your data rights, protect your privacy, and take back full legal control of all your personal data.

We are organising a Wikipedia training workshop in London to mark the 1 year anniversary of the block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are disappointed that no progress has been made to find a solution to resolve the issue, and would like to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of Turkish culture and history to show that the Wikimedia community is trying to improve both the Turkish Wikipedia as well as the coverage of Turkish culture in English.

All welcome – English and Turkish speakers, including those with no prior experience editing Wikipedia!

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

In this session, we’ll discuss the ideas and practice behind corporate governance. We’ll follow that up with a discussion of a critical theoretical perspective, asking whether the corporate form allows for moral action on the part of the corporation or the people within it, and considering what changes are necessary to allow this.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Ntropy and DCC Global invite you for Decentralised A.I. Brunch on Saturday, 5th May at 10am. On the menu - round table open discussion where we will be joined by our special guest Ben Livshits, Chief Scientist at Brave Software.

Software is eating the world and internet has become the most important connecting tissue between crowds, organisations and platforms. Lacking a web native model of value exchange, the internet resulted in copying business models of conglomerates of the past creating extremely centralised and powerful entities capable of establishing complete control over choice, opinion and access.

Artificial Intelligence is giving superpowers to the software that is already consuming the world, thus this control tightens. Responsibility frameworks are poorly established and not web native either.

11:05 Special Guest’s Talk about “Machine learning on the edge”. We are accustomed to the big data approach to machine learning, where user data is aggregated, leading to privacy challenges. I’ll talk about the challenges of machine learning on the edge, i.e. client devices, and the trade-offs between the accuracy and privacy.

11:30 Closing, more tea & coffee networking

Guests:

Ben Livshits - Chief Scientist for Brave Software, reader at Imperial College London and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington

Guillaume Chaslot - Founder at Algotransparency (virtual intro)

Nare Vardanyan - Co-founder at Ntropy Network

Alina Bezuglova - Leader at Decentralised Computer Consortium

About special guest:

Ben Livshits is Chief Scientist for Brave Software (https://brave.com/), the company behind the Brave browser, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks intrusive ads and trackers. He is also a Reader at Imperial College London and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Previously, he was a research scientist at Microsoft Research. He received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006. Ben’s research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis techniques to finding errors in programs. Ben has published papers at PLDI, POPL, Oakland Security, Usenix Security, CCS, SOSP, ICSE, FSE, and many other venues. He is the author of over 100 academic papers, dozens of patents, and multiple tech transfer awards for bringing research into practice.

Join us for an evening of discussion on Ethics in Mathematics, a relatively neglected field with high potential to make tractable improvements to society. This bold statement rests on the premise that mathematicians are extremely valued by society and often end up in powerful places.

Our speaker is Maurice Chiodo, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, bye-fellow in mathematics at King’s College Cambridge, co-ordinator at the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society and lead investigator of the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Project.

18:00 - 18:30 Networking and arrivals

18:30 - 19:00 Maurice Chiodo introducing the field and current challenges

Newspeak House invites you to a roundtable focused on political data and modelling, hosted by:

Dr John Bryden, Research Fellow at Royal Holloway. John’s research focuses on modelling the behaviour of political groups and developing methods to study political activity on social media, especially on Twitter.

John Sandall, Fellow at Newspeak House. John is an independent data science consultant. In April 2017, he created SixFifty in order to predict the UK General Election using open data and advanced modelling techniques.

The event will be very informal, and we particularly welcome activists and practitioners with no academic background. The event will be held in the Newspeak House Drawing Room. Space is very limited, so please register as soon as possible. We reserve the right to refund tickets depending on capacity changes up to three days before the event.

With the growing interest in so-called ‘dark’ political advertising, fake news, and unfettered online abuse, Governments around the world have been attempting to regulate and clamp down on social media platforms. Is it all in vain? Can it be done? Should it? What can practically be enforced?

Ireland’s efforts to break a decades-old political deadlock over its de facto abortion ban inspired a bold political response. Its politicians agreed to create a Citizens’ Assembly to tackle the issue.

A random pick of Irish people deliberated on the highly contentious question. One hundred people took part, balanced for age, gender, social class and region. They heard from experts, campaigners and women directly affected by the ban. Their conclusion, reached in April 2017, recommended radical liberalisation.

The assembly’s work helped bring on a national referendum on abortion in 2018, when Irish voters will have a chance to change abortion laws.

Ireland’s approach was similar to the one it used on same-sex marriage, which voters approved in 2015. Both mark breakthrough moments for all those wondering how politics could be done differently. Rather than leaving decisions to elected politicians, The Irish showed how public wisdom can help cut through controversy.

At a time of deep dysfunction in our electorally driven politics - what issue wouldn’t lend itself to a citizens’ assembly approach? Where might things be on Brexit, on Scottish independence, poverty and other social justice questions given access to public panels addressing such questions?

When Citizens Assemble is the first in the global, nine-film series All Hands On. The series focus will be the state of world democracy and real-life efforts to radically improve it using the ages-old device of public juries. Follow the films, or get involved directly to help fund and publicise it, by signing up for project updates via this link.

Are you a software developer interested in the media or economics? Or a journalist interested in technology’s capacity to inform and empower?

Join us for this informal brainstorming evening hosted by Economy, a non-profit organisation that aims to make economics more accessible and relevant to the public. Economy wants to experiment with innovative technologies that can change people’s consumption of news and make economics less confusing. They also believe that bringing people together from different fields is the best way to spark creativity. You don’t need a deep knowledge of economics, just an interest in helping the public make better life choices.

Swap ideas. Meet interesting people. Share a beer.

PROGRAMME:

6:30pm: Registration and networking

6:45pm: Introduction from Economy

6:50pm: Group Brainstorm 1: How could we use technology to facilitate immediate interactivity and action around economic topics?

7:10pm: Group Brainstorm 2: What type of products could we design to embed a little bit of economic learning and literacy into people’s daily routine?

7:30pm: Debrief and networking, followed by the pub

Economy is a public education charity promoting accessible, engaging and pluralist economics. We produce accessible, relatable, engaging content on the subject for our digital platform, www.ecnmy.org, and run economics crash courses in marginalised communities across the UK. We also campaign for economics to be statutory in schools, and work with economic institutions to create spaces for people to engage with their policies and ideas in an accessible way.

Targeting marginalisation in academia, RCA Students of Unbias is teaming up to run a workshop on equality with Wikimedia and Denise Norris focusing on Women (Cis & Trans) / LGBTQIA+ experiences in IT and in information access online.

Unbias.cc is a creative commons project that continues to seek collaborative and like-minded supporters keen for systemic change and an egalitarian, inclusive culture to challenge western and androcentric hegemonies. As gender and race bias is a well-known problem within higher education, our ambition is to join forces with academics, activists, and web developers to improve ease of access to web-based information featuring women, people of colour, non-western origin and LGBTQIA+.

Our work is revolving around finding a multitude of functions to increase equality in representation and access to marginalised perspectives. A first proof-of-concept response to the issue at hand pioneered the Unbias plugin supported by Wikimedia.

Event schedule

4:00 - 4:10 Short introduction and welcome by Unbias, hosting the event, and a safe space policy brief.

Throughout history, citizens have come together to respond to major societal problems and work towards common goals.

Today, technology is rapidly changing the way we live, work, and play, and new pressing problems are arising. Social media echo chambers, fake news, net neutrality, misuse of personal data, ethics of artificial intelligence. These are but to name a few.

Most recently, the Facebook Cambridge Analytica exposé has shown millions of people are being impacted worldwide.

The Fourth Group ran a petition calling to hold Facebook to account. It garnered the support of over 175,000 people in a matter of days and helped put pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to commit to appear in front of US Congress and investigate other cases of misuse of data by third party providers.

Now, to build on this momentum, The Fourth Group is exploring the potential of creating a new union of citizens to hold technology to account.

This union of citizens would be an organised group of people, non-partisan and independently funded, whose aims would be to ensure advancements in technology serve the interests of all citizens, leaving nobody behind.

This union of citizens would aim to:

Understand what citizens around the world believe are the major issues we need to collectively respond to in the digital age;

Develop citizens’ knowledge and skills to empower them to take impactful action for real world change;

Work with governments, businesses, and civil society to bring about the change we want to see in the world, and;

Build a world where technology leads to progress for us all, leaving nobody behind.

This month, we are hosting a meeting to explore this idea further and to see if there is a desire to make this happen.

We are charging a small nominal ticket fee of £5 for general admission, with free entry to founding patrons. To become a patron, go to www.patreon.com/UnitedCitizens. All proceeds will go to the early development of this project. Registration

Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the US Senate to answer questions about the misuse of Facebook users’ personal data. This is in response to pressure from the public, media, politicians, and organised civil society.

The Fourth Group will co-host a live viewing of his testimony with Newspeak House in London. To attend, please register here and we will send updates accordingly.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, The Fourth Group started a petition signed by over 175,000 people calling for Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of US authorities and to investigate other misuses of data by third party providers. Mark has agreed to both of these actions. We also called for him to appear in UK Parliament which he has refused to do.

Details of the petition can be found here: www.change.org/TalkToUsMark

An afternoon + evening of election-related coworking, hosted by Democracy Club, Tech For Good and Citizen Beta at Newspeak House. Open to all, from experienced political technologists to those who are just interested. Bring a computer.

1/ Councils announce candidates today, but not as structured data - we all need this data so let’s aggregate it together! We’ll be here to help if you don’t know how to get started.

What: Jam for Change is a big arts Jam Session. We want people to come along and make art, music, video games and any content you can think of. At the end of the following week we will bundle it all together and sell it to raise funds for women’s aid.

The aim: raising money for Women’s Aid, to stop violence against women! You can join in person at Newspeak House, or take part online from the comfort of your own home.

Ability required: Absolutely none! we will be providing lots of support and materials, feel free to bring along children. They will find it easy to get involved and make content during the Jam.

The theme: party games!

Date: 10am - 6pm, Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th April 2018

Come make stuff together in a friendly space full of first-time jammers, experienced devs, and people who’ve never done any game development whatsoever.

We will offer support for everyone and even some of our own tools and entire games you can use to simply mod and theme yourself. Even if you have no experience whatsoever you WILL be able to make a game or two.

We will spend 8 hours each day together having fun and making things! It should be inspired by the theme, but can be as weird and wonderful as you like: a digital version of Pass the Parcel, or a twister inspired boardgame! Don’t worry if it all goes wrong! At the end of it, we shall have something fun.

At the end of the next week the creations will all be bundled together and sold to raise funds for women’s aid.

Lightning talks:

Victoria Krakovna: Victoria is a research scientist at DeepMind, where she works on AI safety. Her PhD in statistics and machine learning at Harvard focused on building interpretable models. Before joining DeepMind, she co-founded the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization working to mitigate technological risks to humanity and increase the chances of a positive future.

Robert Miles: Robert is a computer scientist and online educator with an interest in AI, particularly the risks and safety issues around advanced AI systems. For the last year or so he’s run a YouTube channel, making videos explaining our best understanding of the nature of the risks posed by emerging AI technologies, and the technical research currently underway to understand and mitigate those risks.

A design thinking inspired open conversation around innovating health in the UK

What innovation programs and efforts are currently happening?

How can entrepreneurs and innovators respond?

What data, tech developments, and patient tools need development and better utilisation?

How could blockchain be used in the health sector?

What responsibility do pharmaceutical companies help innovate healthcare?

The event opens with a panel of experts discussing current innovation initiatives, the NHS outcomes framework, and their experiences ath the forefront of the NHS.

We will then open it out to a fishbowl format to continue developing ideas and discussion points, using design thinking as a guiding framework for exploring possibilities.

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
— Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

City Hall have launched a “listening exercise” to help the Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell and his Board fulfil the Mayor’s aim of making London the world’s leading Smart City.

We believe that a Smart City should also be a Networked City, where community-led mapping, technology and network-building combine to address social isolation and ensure an inclusive, fair society in a rapidly-changing world.

On March 27 2018 we are holding two events:

In the afternoon we are running a workshop for anyone involved in mapping assets and networks in London communities, or interested in learning how to do that.

We’ll share the results of our exercise in mapping the London mappers, to show who is doing what. We’ll do some hands-on work with Nicolas Fonty and Barbara Brayshay of Justmap, and also Drew Mackie of Connecting Londoners, who is using network mapping software Kumu and Sumapp. And we’ll discuss how we may form a Community of Practice to continue learning together.

14:00 - 17:30 workshop and mapping exercises

17:30 - 18:30 networking and refreshments

In the evening we’ll share insights from our workshop, hear different perspectives from our panel, and open up for discussion.

18:30 - 21:00 panel dicussion (speakers from Smart City, Connecting Londoners and #waywayahead) and group work

“A better politics awaits us, beckoning us forward. It’s up to us – all of us – whether we recognise that call and take the required actions. Key to these actions will be to harness technology more wisely and more profoundly than before.”

These are the opening words of the new book by chair of London Futurists, David Wood: “Transcending Politics - A Technoprogressive Roadmap to a Comprehensively Better Future”.

In this event at London’s Newspeak House, David Wood will be sharing some of the key analysis from his book, and inviting the audience to advance the creation of the better politics which technology can enable. Topics that will be covered include:

A integrative vision of sustainable abundance for everyone - and the technologies needed to achieve that outcome

Why technological change is presently making politics worse rather than better

Ten legitimate causes of the fear and unrest that are destabilising society - and suggested technoprogressive responses to these issues

The key role of the philosophy of transhumanism in accelerating the transformations needed for humanity to navigate through the existential landmines lurking in the near-future

The Social Change Agency warmly invite you to the launch of our report: Lost Voices: Digital campaigning and its impact on the lived experience, funded by JRCT.
Over the past year, we have been researching the role of digital campaigning in increasing democratic engagement - particularly by those who are most affected by the issues at hand.

We have collated our insights after over 70 interviews with charities, tech providers, MPs and those working with marginalised communities, to compile this report. The report will include key findings and recommendations, along with a tool to help organisations better interrogate their digital campaigning practices.

This event is free and open to all. We rarely get the chance to think critically about our digital campaigning practices. This event is intended to provoke, challenge and provide fertile ground for innovation. We can’t wait to see you there!

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Our second session is about corporate networks. We are reading a highly cited yet controversial paper that describes the structure of transnational networks of corporate control. For the adventurous, we also suggest trying out the possibilities of network analysis using a dataset from the Paradise Papers.

We’re seeking to link two ideas: the potential of “big data,” which is most commonly used to describe people, to tell us more about companies and their role in the world; and the power of social science to give us new angles to explore from.

In our sessions, we’ll explore existing datasets about companies including government-administered registers, scraped platforms and social networks as well as Panama Papers-style megaleaks. A corresponding reading will inform both how we use the data as well as the questions we are asking – “cooking the books” by looking for new meaning in raw data about companies.

How can research support grassroots movements? Can research be a tool for action? How can we avoid replicating oppressive structures such as class in our research work?

The co-operative Research for Action was set up a year ago to support campaigning for social, environmental and economic justice. This far, we have been focusing mainly on local authority finance and democracy. For this event, we want to bring together researchers, journalists and activists to discuss the relationship between research and action - and to celebrate our first anniversary!

The event will start with a panel discussion (speakers TBC soon), followed by interventions from the audience. After the discussion, there will be music and refreshments. Please join us!

Newspeak House is wheelchair accessible. If you have other access needs, please get in touch at info@researchforaction.uk.

This event is for anyone interested in new approaches to improve the prospects and power of workers.

“The opportunity for tech-led, pro-worker innovation are many, but there are just too few people pursuing this agenda. That’s what we want to change.” - Gavin Kelly, CEO Resolution Trust

We want to bring together a community of people who can help develop, fund, support and use new WorkerTech solutions. For example, these could be tools that help workers organise and increase bargaining power, boost skills and pay, and curb insecurity.

“Machine learning” and “AI” are everywhere, but what is machine learning exactly about, and how is it different to e.g. blockchain?

We will provide a gentle introduction and overview for people who are not exposed to computer science and maths, but still want to know what it is all about.

There will be a presentation with some exercises and time to mingle at the end. You will come away with a basic understanding of what machine learning is, what it tries to solve and how, and what it is not.

After many successful hacknights, this is the first side project hackday. It started as a bunch of friends who wanted to work on side projects in the evening after work and not do so by themselves. Come join us and participate!

Everyone can come and bring their side project along. There will be space to sit down and work. Whether it is a mobile app, a novel or a painting, every project is welcome. Show it to people, get motivated and make unreasonable progress on it.

Attention is activism’s most crucial resource, and social media has revolutionised the competition for it.

In many ways, social media has empowered activists and fuelled positive change. But could the trade for our attention be hijacking our free will, and even our democracy?

Join Unicef Next Gen London at this charity event to ask whether social media is empowering or enslaving our generation, with panellists:

Professor David Runciman: Head of Politics and co-director of the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at Cambridge University.

Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu: co-organiser of the Women’s March London, lawyer and founder of Women in Leadership.

James Williams: winner of the 9-Dots Prize for his groundbreaking research into the ethics of attention and persuasion in the digital age, recipient of Google’s highest honour during his ten years’ employment at the company.

Nimco Ali: anti-FGM campaigner and founder of Daughters of Eve, named ‘Woman of the Year’ by Red, and ranked as one of Debretts’ 500 most influential people in Britain.

Dr Alan Watkins, Nick Loader and Simon Jones present their plans to create a digital platform to understand the opinions of citizens and extract wisdom from the crowd.

Dr Alan Watkins is recognised as internationally through his work on leadership and human performance. He has a broad mix of commercial, academic, scientific and technological abilities and over the past 18 years he has been a coach to many of Europe’s top business leaders. He is the author of “Crowdocracy, The End of Politics”.

Nick Loader is Head of Production for CSM group, and has 20 years as a media specialist. He works across digital content creation, brand development and strategy.

Simon Jones specialises in strategic communications and reputation management for governments, corporations, organisations and individuals globally. Over the course of the last 20 years he has advised chief executives and chairs of global organisations, in addition to managing complex and global communications campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands (including Barclays, BBC, BSkyB, Coca Cola, Facebook, Vodafone.

We have to talk about YouTube. Over 4bln videos are hosted but is it a force for good or evil?

YouTube and Google know your deepest desires and darkest fantasies, but also your home location and which is your local pub. How do they get your data? What is the secret sauce in their algorithm that makes you come back for more and more YouTube videos? Meet with YouTube researchers revealing what can be unearthed via scraping and reverse engineering of recommendation engine. What makes YouTube tick? Can we reclaim it?

James Woodcock (London School of Economics) - research on what makes You Tube tick.

Panel will be joined by YouTube Vloggers, e-sports commentators and edu Vloggers

Join the discussion on the cryptic nature of YouTube algorithms. The emergence of intermediaries, Multichannel Networks (MCNs) and affiliate marketing agreements like MCNs claim to help YouTubers making money faster. Although YouTube is a platform seemingly characterised by the amateur video – the truth is that it is dominated by a myriad of commercial channels. What is really going on with the battle for your eyeballs, attention and emotions? Are we losing the opportunities for new video start-ups?

Data scrapping provides one method to attempt to understand how algorithms work. The way follow-up videos are determined can make or break a YouTube channel, but it remains undisclosed to users and your kid may end up watching “Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach For the First Time” or worse.

The recent changes in the terms of joining the partner programme have caused quite a big upheaval amongst small time You Tubers. Small channels now need to have longer viewing hours, longer length of membership and subscribers before they qualify for monetisation. Check out the winners and the losers and have YOUR say on video algos.

Exploring the minefield of class, racism and neoliberalism which informed the EU referendum result, Brexitannia - the first film about Brexit - portrays the people of a once powerful empire as they negotiate their identities in a world that is changing faster than ever, and in which power appears to lie further and further from people’s own hands.

In this first of a series of occasional screenings presented by Unite Community, we will be joined by director and Tower Hamlets resident Timothy George Kelly, and special guests, for a post-film discussion.

Cook the Books Club is a facilitated reading group to explore what we can learn about companies using public data sources, drawing inspiration from the latest ideas in social science.

Please send an email to aleksi.knuutila@iki.fi if you are interested in participating.

Our first session will begin with a short article about the history of the corporation and a discussion about the nature of companies.

We’re seeking to link two ideas: the potential of “big data,” which is most commonly used to describe people, to tell us more about companies and their role in the world; and the power of social science to give us new angles to explore from.

In our sessions, we’ll explore existing datasets about companies including government-administered registers, scraped platforms and social networks as well as Panama Papers-style megaleaks. A corresponding reading will inform both how we use the data as well as the questions we are asking – “cooking the books” by looking for new meaning in raw data about companies.

The Commons Platform Co-Creation Group are building a secure, open source, decentralised commons-owned social network for community organising, activism, resource-sharing, crowd-sourcing, open access research, education and data, independent media, ethical commerce and a new economy.

Creating a more equal world where everyone can create solutions for themselves

Come along and meet other members of the group, get out some post-its and map out a plan for the Commons Platform. This workshop will be part visionary, part practical, methodical and thorough in places, and all hopefully fun and nice with great people. And lots and lots of post-it notes!

What is our collective dream/mission for 2025? What do we want to achieve in the next 5 years? Where could we realistically be in 2 years? What is our plan for the next 3 months, what are all the things we need to do and how are we going to do them?

If you are not able to be there the whole time please let me know what times work for you between 12 and 5 so I can work out how to fit your particular skill/interest area into the time you are available. If I don’t know what your interests are yet let me know!

If you are not already a member of the Commons Platform Co-Creation Group please contact Sophie Varlow sophievarlow@btinternet.com to find out about how we work and our values/aims.

Could new plans to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” have unintended consequences?

Hear from ORG campaigns manager Mike Morel about how the Government is working with social media companies to decide acceptable standards for online content.

Learn how heavy fines could encourage the use of automated censors that can hurt free speech, and how murky definitions of ‘harmful content’ give social media companies unprecedented control over free speech online.

We are facing an age of massive political change. Racist nationalisms, pervasive gendered violence, the environmental breakdown, corporate power and precarious jobs — the system we live in doesn’t work for the majority of us and it is crumbling. But how can we fight inequalities in the long-term if we don’t know what we’re fighting for?
DEGROWTH — SYSTEMIC ALTERNATIVES #1 is the first in a series of workshops where we imagine how the economic, political and social order could be different in the future.

Degrowth theory takes a political ecology perspective to challenge the idea that unlimited economic growth is the best way to organize our economies and lives. The movement demands that we scale-down our obsession with consumerism and shrink the economic system, leaving more space for human cooperation and ecosystems.

Together with our speakers, we’ll be exploring how degrowth can contribute to a future we want to live in. Is it possible to degrow our economy within a global capitalist order? What would a degrowth economy look like? What is the future of work and energy production? Can we live locally in a globalised world? And is degrowth really possible in a world of rapid automation and technological change?

Speakers:

DOROTHY GRACE GUERRERO is head of policy at Global Justice Now. Before, she worked for Focus on the Global South and other organisations in the Philippines, Thailand, Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa. She works on and writes about degrowth, climate change and energy issues, the impacts of globalised trade and investments on people’s livelihoods in Asia, China‘s new role in the global political economy and other economic justice concerns.

AARON VANSINTJAN is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on economics, politics, cities, and food. He is a member of Research and Degrowth and the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability. He recently edited the book In defense of degrowth and is a co-editor at Uneven Earth.

Our Future Now is a group of young activists based in London; we are part of the Global Justice Now youth network. LIKE OUR FACEBOOK PAGE (https://www.facebook.com/OurFutureNow/) to stay informed about what we’re getting up to and our next Systemic Alternatives workshop.

What a difference a year makes! Social change often feels like a long game but more and more we are seeing incredible women harness the power of digital to create impact quickly.

Just days into 2018 the energy, conversation and activism of the #MetToo movement has translated into action with #TimesUp raising $15M for women to challenge sexual assault, harrassment and abuse in the workplace. And the year is only just beginning!

For WeHuddle’s first event of 2018 we are bringing together amazing women who show that it is possible to turn ambitions into action quickly. We’ll discuss our own activism goals for 2018 and hear tips and tricks to inspire us to make this the year we turn our goals into reality.

Come along to get the inspiration and support you need to make 2018 an impactful year for you!

We’ll be joined by:

Paula Akpan, co-founder of the ‘I’m Tired’ Project and social media coordinator for gal-dem magazine, and Nicole Crentsil, founder of Unmasked Women. In 2017 Paula and Nicole crowdfunded and launched The Black GIrl Festival, the UK’s first Black British festival for women and girls that celebrated and explored what it means to be a Black woman in the UK.

More speakers to be announced soon.

Doors open 6.45pm discussion starts at 7.15pm.

WeHuddle supports world changing women (all women!) through community, events and resources. Our events are open to all and proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the organisations represented by our speakers.

After the sell-out success of our first event, we look forward to starting 2018 as we mean to go on.

Democracy Cafe, a London-based network organisation focused on creating new technological tools for democratic debate, engagement and decision-making, is organising a day-long event at Newspeak House on the 4th of February, in which political activists from across Europe can meet and discuss pressing political issues in an informal “Cafe” setting.

Join a conversation with Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher and Wikimedia UK Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid on the Future of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.

As we reach 50% of the world’s population having access to the internet, what does the digital arrival of the Global South mean for the Wikimedia movement and its goal to give every human being access to the sum of all knowledge?

How will the movement deal with issues like the digital gender gap, and the problem of the representation of women and non-European people on Wikipedia? How is the community dealing with the problem of information verification in the ‘post-truth’ era? How should Wikipedia be used in academia, and how should educational and cultural institutions get involved in the Open Access movement?

Come and find out how the Wikimedia movement is addressing these issues and ask Katherine and Lucy anything you want to know about Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wikidata is the intersection between wikis and big data. You can upload data about almost anything to Wikidata, and then use its search functions to query this data in any language.

Started in Germany in 2012, Wikidata now comprises over 42 million items, and with some basic coding knowledge, you can ask it questions like ‘show me all the children of Genghiz Khan in a cluster tree’, ‘What are all the cities in the world with a female mayor’. and ‘show me all the cats with photographs on Wikipedia’.

Wikidata is an important tool for researchers, journalists, scientists and anyone else who wants to systematically study large quantities of data, and new data is being added to Wikidata all the time.

Come to a hackathon hosted by Wikimedia UK to find out how Wikidata works and how you can use it. Experienced Wikimedians will show you everything you need to know to start asking Wikidata questions which can help you research the subject areas you care about. If you are a more experienced coder or Wikidata user, we will have an advanced stream with developers there to show you more complex things you can do with Wikidata, and tools you can use to make the most of its vast possibilities.

Training will include:

Introduction to Wikidata - editing Wikidata items

Using SPARQL to write queries and search the data

A-Z of useful tools (Visualisation and upload/data management)

Wikidata games

Importing data to Wikidata from spreadsheets

Refreshments will be provided, and participants should bring their own laptop to work on.

Platform.Earth is a vision of a microservices architecture to support human organisation - to digitally enable all sorts of stuff that seems tedious and bureaucratic, but which is necessary for legal constitution, for good democratics, for effective debate - and make these easy, so that the maximum space for the human interactions - the real work of groups - can be as free, as creative, as joyful, as beautiful, as serious, as it wants to be. #darVOZPlatformEarth #darVOZParty

We have the opportunity of engaging with some coders who work in the area of argument / decision mapping - of building the data structures and graphical tools that we will need to present the Ethical Framework in effective ways.

The current tools are not quite as rich as we might need them to be. This session gives us a chance to show these projects what we are doing, discuss the potential reach of the Ethical Framework, discuss the use cases and the qualities which will be needed.

This work will carry forward into working with developers on Friday and a session on Sunday, too. #darVOZargmaps

Trevor Hilder will run his one-day, workshop course on Stafford Beer’sViable System Model.
Trevor learned directly from Beer in the 1990s, and has experience of using the model with great success.
Highly interactive sessions, limited numbers. Book soon!

A four hour workshop to teach the fundamental concepts of how organisations work, based on the work of Professor Stafford Beer in the field of management cybernetics, which he founded in the 1960s.

Beer applied these concepts to fields as diverse as managing steel production, publishing, banking and economic policy. I learned them from Beer in the 1990s and since then have applied them with great success to understanding organisations and building better (software) systems to free people to get their work done with the minimum of bureaucracy.

I recently taught these ideas to the COO of an organisation with an annual turnover of £30 million which reduced his working week from 100 hours to about fifteen!

The workshop will be in depth and highly interactive, and I will be helping participants work on their own interests as we go along. It will consist of two sessions of about two hours each, with a break for lunch in between:

How would you design a currency that strengthened democracy?
Is debt-based currency inherently oligarchic? Is it possible for money with a monopoly on issuance to play well with effective democracy?
Does size matter? How is the scale of operation of money systems related to the scale of operation of democracy?
What are the parameters of money systems? What are their implications? How do they interact - with each other? With their social setting? Can we design money systems with any confidence about their large-scale systemic features? To what extent do currency systems exhibit formally complex properties?

Bitcoin has lifted the lid of Pandora’s money-box. It is now incontrovertibly the case that many characteristics of money are simply design decisions that get made.
That many types of currency are imaginable, with wildly disparate characteristics and implications.
At this point the important question is - what type of money will work best with the kind of society we would like?
It’s time to institute the study of money as a design problem - to pull money, squirming and struggling, into the light, and begin to map the possibility space more thoroughly, more seriously, more operationally than ever before.

COME AND ENGAGE
We’ll be running a World Cafe / Unconference approach - identifying areas for discussion, grouping up to open them up, re-grouping to share.
Th podcast studio will be open for polemics, interviews, debates, summaries.
We’ll be looking to identify key areas for exploration/research/documentation.

darVOZ will be soft-launching a creative currency, a mutual credit currency intended to facilitate all sorts of creative and collaborative work in the areas addressed during the week.

Wiki 2.0: Ward Cunningham, inventor of wiki, has been working on a full-on re-imagining of the wiki approach in a project called Federated Wiki - where your pages are your own, with lightweight and flexible navigation and multi-format content, but with a beautiful and liberating new dimension, whereby any user can fork, remix and adapt content from any public page, while preserving a full accreditation history.

A week long Holochain Sprint-athon; a hackathon, but with definite coding projects (of course, you are welcome to roll your own!).

The principal focus will be on LiquidWiki - a step change in the functionality and collaborative power of wiki. We’ll also we working on mutual credit currencies and argument mapping.

Running alongside this, there will be a series of evening DEMOCRACY CAFE style events, to provide inspiration, content and ideas to feed in to the coding. The week will be rounded off with two DemocracyLab events over the weekend, exploring new modes and tools for democratic design and constitution of organisations and institutions. Full Programme here.

The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam event (game creation) taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. Get together and make a game in 48 hours.

This Global Game Jam hub is organised by Games for the Many, a collective of game developers and political activists using the power of play to impact politics.

Over 2.2 billion people worldwide will be playing games in 2018. A hit game is not only fun, but also an opportunity for a transformative and educational experience. As technology, politics and urbanisation make our lives more complex, games can help us thrive in this new post-truth world by allowing us to learn faster about things we need to know.

Cybersalon.org will host a panel on how game creatives and social innovators can put spotlight on real-world challenges like state and work surveillance, fake news and anti-democratic practices of modern governments while providing inspiring game experiences.

Speakers

Rich Metson – game designer and OFF GRID co-author. The game reveals the world of surveillance and invites player to explore the avoidance and defense techniques.

Amanda Walker –”Fake It to Make it” US-based web games author and interactive designer interested in fighting propaganda and confusion in Mainstream Media in US and beyond (joining via Skype from US)

Osmiotic Studios – Hamburg-based authors of “Orwell” game, sharing the key points from the development and potential of the game for impact

Ben Greenaway – Cybersalon’s games’ reviewer who will discuss Riot and also impact of AI and AR in Games for Change

Chair: Rosa Carbo-Mascarell – London-based game designer and Corbyn Run game co-author, Creative Director for Game Jam and Games For The Many

Cybersalon will be hosting a Summer 2018 competition for Game Creators Challenge and will incubate/support projects with production and fundraising support. We are looking for AI applications in Games for Social Change, AR as well as web-based, mobile and board games that aim to bring fun to civic issues.

Open Rights Group Legal Director Myles Jackman joins us at Newspeak House to illustrate the critical importance of legal action in the fight to defend our digital rights.

Learn about ORG’s record of achievements at the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the Royal Court of Justice in London. We’ll also survey fast approaching legal challenges in 2018 involving age-verification technology, protecting free speech online, and fighting the Government’s mass surveillance programme.

No experience or knowledge is necessary for this FREE event! All you need is an interest in protecting our human rights in the digital era.

We want to hear from you, so there will be plenty of time for questions and group discussion. Join us!

The Brexit vote sent a shockwave through the political establishment in the UK and across the world, but there have been allegations that foreign states such as Russia tried to influence the vote. These include accusations of thousands of bots being set up to sow discord in order to destablise the European Union. Some Members of Parliament have even called for a judge-led inquiry into the possibility that Russia meddled with the referendum.

But is it all true? And if it is, did it really have an impact on how people voted on Brexit? What can or should be done to guard against social media warfare in the future? Join us to listen, ask questions, and learn on the 5th of January.

January’s meeting will be where we determine the next few months of network work. We have a substantial amount of money in the bank, many members and a strong track record of work, but strategy and capacity problems have led to an impasse about how to move forward.

So January’s meeting will be a pot-luck of proposals and ideas for out future.

ALL RHN MEMBERS ARE INVITED TO PUT FORWARD PROPOSALS FOR WHAT WE DO WITH OUR MONEY, TIME AND RESOURCES OVER THE NEXT 12 MONTHS AT JANUARY’S MEETING.

PLEASE BRING A PROPOSAL, OR TEN, THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE NETWORK DO FOR US TO DISCUSS.

NOTHING TO HIDE is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument.

The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers.

NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.

Civil Society Futures is a national conversation about how English civil society can flourish in a fast changing world. Come and share your hopes and fears for the future, the changes you’re seeing in civil society, and together co-develop specific visions for what civil society might look like ten years from now.

“An inquiry into the future of civil society suggests concern about the present. In politics this relates to concerns about a democratic deficit, and a series of public issue crises: an environmental crisis, a refugee crisis, and health and housing crises.

This is set against a backdrop of concerns about fake news which adds to and reflects a lack of trust in public actors. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer (2017), between October 2016 and January 2017 trust in government fell from 36% to 26%; in business from 45% to 33% and in the media from 32% to 24%.

Britain also has a significant ‘trust gap’ of 19% between ‘informed publics’ (‘in the upper income quartile, university educated and with a declared interest in politics and the media’) and those with an income of less than £15,000.” - initial research report

Before the event we will send out a poll to help create a frame for the discussion - make sure you register.

The event will be hosted by Marietta Le who is an Engagement Manager at BetterPoints, and a founder and activist working on civic tech initiatives in Hungary.

Use the hashtag #CivilSocietyFutures or mention us at @civsocfutures on Twitter.

Please note that for the purpose of summarising the takeaways of the discussion the event will be recorded (audio).

In his first keynote speech since becoming Shadow Digital Minister, Rt. Hon. Liam Byrne MP will draw on his history of Britain’s entrepreneurial revolution to set out the roadmap for developing Labour’s digital manifesto over the year to come.

Liam Byrne MP’s speech will be introduced by Rt. Hon. Tom Watson MP, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition.

Afterwards, Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, will lead an ‘in conversation’ with Liam Byrne, with time for questions and answers from the audience.

In the summer of 2013, front-line police officer’s from the Metropolitan Police’s Commissioner’s 100 volunteered to set up and run the first UK Policing Hackathon - Hack the Police. The entire event was a voluntary effort to develop and trial new technology and new ways of working. Invitees were both serving front-line officers, and independent software developers.

This year, we’re bringing the event back to further explore the themes of:

Better first hand evidence and reducing suggestion.

Improving comfort and building rapport in the interview room.

Tools for better police wellbeing and mental health.

We aim to once again engage with developers, designers, researchers, and officers. We’ll also have representatives from the Forensic Psychology Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Gone are the days of conventional 9 to 5. As we strive to redress our work-life balance;

How can we help each other to ensure our energies are focused where they should be?

How can we best leverage and sustainably build, our constant connection and ever expanding network?

Cut through the (white) noise and be connected to gigs where we can both give value and feel valued?

What are our personal value systems? How ready are we for skills-sharing and non-monetised working?

Please join facilitator Alexandra Wright, ceo/founder of Able app, for a special meetup celebrating and exploring work in the gig-economy. During the session you will have the opportunity to collaborate with other independent workers, and begin to build additional support networks together. Additional presenters/facilitators tba

Blockchain (a digital, decentralised, public ledger of transactions) forms a core component of Bitcoin, the worldwide cryptocurrency, and is often talked about for its potential in other aspects of society.

Due to the secure and transparent nature of blockchain, it is touted as a concept that could be used for online voting platforms not just for representative elections, but for direct democracy, liquid democracy, and participatory budgeting.

If you’re interested to find out more about blockchain and how it can be applied, join us to listen, ask questions, and learn on the 6th of December.

Speakers:

Dr David Galindo - Senior Lecturer in Computer Security, University of Birmingham

A fortnightly reading group. For this session, we’ll be talking about academia and research, with a particular focus on how Brexit will affect Britain’s standing as a place of research excellence and innovation.

Over the past two years Fako Berkers and Edward Saperia have created an experimental framework called WikiFeed. It allows you to create open source algorithmic newsfeeds using semantic data and metadata from Wikimedia.

We think this could allow new transparent and collaborative approaches to editorial policy, and also be a powerful way to discover stories in niche areas.

We’re running our first open workshop to experiment creating custom feeds. We’ll teach you everything you need to know and be on hand to support. You’ll need to bring a laptop. Remote participation is also possible - get in touch via ed@newspeak.house

The workshop is being run on both Saturday and Sunday. Both days are the same; it’ll be a short intro followed by free time to experiment with the framework. Please register so we can gauge numbers.

Intro: 1pm - 1:30pm

Workshop: 1:30 - 4pm

A more detailed introduction to the underlying technology can be found here.

Over the past two years Fako Berkers and Edward Saperia have created an experimental framework called WikiFeed. It allows you to create open source algorithmic newsfeeds using semantic data and metadata from Wikimedia.

We think this could allow new transparent and collaborative approaches to editorial policy, and also be a powerful way to discover stories in niche areas.

We’re running our first open workshop to experiment creating custom feeds. We’ll teach you everything you need to know and be on hand to support. You’ll need to bring a laptop. Remote participation is also possible - get in touch via ed@newspeak.house

The workshop is being run on both Saturday and Sunday. Both days are the same; it’ll be a short intro followed by free time to experiment with the framework. Please register so we can gauge numbers.

Intro: 1pm - 1:30pm

Workshop: 1:30 - 4pm

A more detailed introduction to the underlying technology can be found here.

Brexit is happening. And whatever level of hardness it eventually takes, we are all going to have to live with it. It makes sense then to gather and talk about how we plan to weather the storm.

There will be winners and losers from Brexit and I think it makes sense to sit and talk lucidly about the consequences we foresee, and what actions we can take. Hopefully this group will be as pragmatic as it is utopian.

There is a lot of negativity and despair in the news about Brexit, and some of it is certainly warranted. But rather than falling into apathy, we can do something wonderful by coming together reminding ourselves of the potential positives that will emerge over the next few years.

The plan is to host this as a fortnightly discussion group held at Newspeak House. Join this facebook group for updates.

Open Rights Group presents a talk by Joyce Hakmeh on the use of cyber crime laws to criminalise criticism of governments in the Gulf states on social media. She is a legal and development expert working on the Middle East and North Africa region since 2006.

Her areas of expertise include cybercrime, rule of law, good governance, international criminal justice, and international aid. She is researching cybercrime legislation in the Gulf countries and has worked for organizations including UNDP, IFRC, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, as well as for NGOs and media organizations.

Rich and Nati have been supporting non-hierarchical organisations for more than five years, co-founding Loomio (a worker co-op building software for collective decision-making) and Enspiral (a network of self-organising companies):

We’re currently touring Korea, USA, Europe, and South America, meeting with all kinds of entrepreneurs, activists, coaches and organizers who are trying to work with less hierarchy and more collaboration: people in democratic workplaces, intentional communities, startups, collectives, and NGOs.

In our journey we’ve discovered that every group faces common challenges when they try to work non-hierarchically. In this workshop we’ll share 8 collaboration patterns that have been proven to help groups overcome these common failure points, from group culture, to technology, decision-making and flattening power imbalances.

Most importantly, we don’t just tell people about participatory organizing, we practice it together, co-creating the workshop and learning by experience. You can bring your real challenges that you are facing in your team, organisation, or collective and we’ll work together to design solutions you can try immediately.

“Through these patterns I could see how my past adventures with non-hierarchical groups had fallen apart. It gave me new ideas to bring back to my own fledgling cooperative. I imagine that everyone in the room was experiencing a similar revelation; the uncovering of something known but also unnamed, the implicit patterns that are present in every group of humans, which so often are never identified, seemed here to be explicit, finally.” - Drew Hornbein, Good Good Work

To maximise accessibility, we have a sliding scale of ticket prices. If you can’t afford a discounted ticket, but you really want to be there, send us an email at nati@loomio.org. We have a few scholarships available.

Mass hallucinations, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions have been a challenge for long duration space missions for decades and can only become more prevalent as we embark on Mars missions.

Join us at ‘Survive on Mars: Life in Isolation’ to learn from Dr Vincent Giampietro about the mental health issues astronauts face in space and train your brain like an astronaut.
We will be exploring solutions to the mental health problems using design thinking.

Dr Vincent Giampietro is a Neuroscientist and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Neuroimaging at King’s College London (KCL). His main research interest is in imaging brain functions, in health and in disease, with a current focus on developing MRI-based neurofeedback as a novel neurotherapy.

Vincent combines his research activities with his innate curiosity for space through tailored educational sessions on the role of neuroimaging to study astronauts’ brains and to monitor their mental health and cognitive functions before, during, and after their missions.

Doors open at 7.00pm. There will be plenty of time to meet and collaborate with like-minded people.

With Winner-Take-All Platforms like Amazon, Airbnb, and JustEast, many small, local businesses are facing a huge challenge in delivering more orders online whilst maintaining a strong profit margin. This is a stand against the Extraction Economy. This meetup is for high street and local businesses with a strong connection to their communities - who want to use technology to reach more people and sell more goods, whilst finding a way to strengthen their local area in the process.

Have you had negative experiences selling your food or products through third party platforms online, and you want a place to share your frustrations and struggles? If so and you are eager to learn how and where you can do it better…

This event is for you. Hosted at the Hub of everything that intersects technological, economic and social change…

Evening Format:

6:30pm - 7:00pm: Arrival and Drinks

7:00pm: Introduction and insight by hosts

Josiane Smith, Country Manager, Digital Town and Project Lead, smart.london

You’ll learn about better ways to sell more of your orders online (make more money, get more online traffic, connect with the city and the world) through a visionary, new (and free) smart cities platform. For more info - check out https://smart.london

7:30pm: Pitches by 3 small businesses or restaurateurs who have stories to share about their online selling experiences - the good, the bad and the ugly! (Please contact Josiane if you would be interested in sharing your story.)

8:00pm: Speed Learning - the opportunity for those with tips and tricks about eCommerce to share what they know with other local businesses and restaurateurs who are new to online sales and/or online delivery and are eager to learn more.

The aim of this project is to work towards the development of some real projects that build out spaces of non-market value-creation and access as sustainable (and hopefully replicable and/or scalable) bubbles of engaging and useful human interaction that lie outside capitalism.

Such projects need careful imagination, design and consideration; to achieve sustainablility and scalability while deliberately standing outside the commoditising market system is deeply challenging. Wikipedia is our poster-child - something of enormous and continuing value, co-created by hundreds of thousands of people with no thought of market exchange, that would either pop like a bubble or simply re-emerge somewhere else if anyone attempting to buy it and monetise it.

Wikipedia has achieved this for systemisable knowledge (there are side projects like wiktionary and the like which extend the model to other areas than encyclopedia style systemising).

Knowledge was perhaps the low hanging fruit - all humans use and co-create knowledge, and systemised knowledge is eminently digitisable.

What other areas might we consider? Starters for ten: reputation/trust, intermediate currencies designed to resist amassing of capital, co-curation of medical experience, co-curation of social experience, platform co-ops.

10,000 deaths in London each year have been attributable to human-made particle air pollution. It’s time to demand change.

This open meeting will discuss why direct action is necessary to tackle the air pollution crisis and how East Londoners organise their own actions.

Stop Killing Londoners - Cut Air Pollution, is an inclusive direct action network organising short sit-downs & dance sessions on London’s most polluted roads. We are working with other groups in the city to create an escalation of protests this autumn to force the politicians to take concrete action.

We offer support and advice to local communities wanting to organise for drastic pollution reduction.

After 40 years of neoliberalization, the promised end of history has led to a decomposition of established hierarchical systems, including politics. This process has culminated in Brexit and Trump. While there are strong reactions against these, the current of political change cannot be rewound back towards neoliberalism. However, alternatives based on the logic of networks and Peer to Peer are emerging and gaining attention.

Join Stacco Troncoso from the P2P Foundation to discuss on how Commons-based peer production — the relational dynamic behind projects such as Wikipedia and Linux — can prefigure new heterarchical systems for dealing with complexity, and how the figure of the “commoner” can be seen as an emancipatory political subject. The discussion will also analyse the municipality coalitions which successfully won local elections in many of Spain’s major cities and how this process contributes to what we call a Commons Transition.

This year, the service design fringe festival team put a focus on inclusion and diversity in our work.

We ran an event in collaboration with UKBlackTech and FutureGov back in June to get service design in front of the BME community, and we ran a workshop about D&I with service designers to start to uncover the problem a little more.

This event is for us to collectively figure out what the value of diversity and inclusion is to the service design industry.

The service design industry is still finding its feet. We have the problems of a teething industry - there’s still some difficulty in persuading clients of the value of service design, and when we get those contracts, there’s a great deal of explaining to do to enable projects to be successful.

People in organisations that want to hire service designers can have trouble providing evidence of the approach’s effectiveness to their colleagues with decision making power.

People transitioning in to service design have difficulty finding junior roles, regardless of their past experience in other professions.

And those with a little experience in service design find themselves starting teams in organisations where they have to build a service design practice from scratch, with little support, and a great deal of pressure to prove that service design works.

This session is an open discussion forum about the issues in the service design industry as it is today. Come to share your woes - you’ll likely find that you’re not alone - and to together come up with potential actions to make a difference to these issues. The session won’t end without some actions being identified! We’re focused on being constructive :)

We held a similar discussion event in April attended by festival volunteers - it was validating to attend, and we’d like to offer the opportunity for you to attend a repeat session.

The festival is designed to be an intervention to tackle some of the industry’s problems. Your input in this session could help the festival’s future direction. The festival is community-run, and this event may bring to light an opportunity for you to get more involved, and benefit your own career at the same time.

The Spider’s Web, Britain’s Second Empire is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial, to a global financial power.

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands.

Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance.

How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider’s Web sets out to investigate.

There will be a Q&A after the screening, participants to be announced.

Politics is meant to be ‘the art of the possible’ – yet the defining political developments of recent years have been events widely declared ‘impossible’ until they happened. How do we find our bearings in a time when the boundaries of political possibility are repeatedly breached?

Over five days at Newspeak House, Dougald Hine has been hosting conversations with artists, technologists, thinkers and doers about this. On the last night he is opening it up to anyone who wants to join and hear a bit about where the conversations have led – and maybe try out some of what has been talking about.

He’ll be joined by guests including Billy Bottle and Liz Slade, and probably some of the others who have been involved over the weekend.

Here are some of the starting points for their conversations:

This suggestion from Will Davies in the LRB: ‘The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism.’

These lines from theatre-maker Chris Goode: ‘my sense is that only seldom is the problem that we ‘don’t know’ – or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough. The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront that knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness.’

Members, Parliamentarians and potential future members are invited to apply to attend. Please also pass the invitation along to new and young employees - with a particular emphasis on young people and those new to the tech and political sectors who may not have engaged with us before.

Please join the waitlist for this event using your work email address. Once we have approved your request, your registration will be confirmed and you will be sent further details of the event. This event will introduce Pictfor to a wider network, engage young people working in tech and policy, while also exploring the future of tech.

This interactive, interview-style panel event will discuss:

What is the future of tech?

What skills do the next generation working in tech need to excel?

How will Generation Z shape technology?

BCS will be sharing findings from their new report on diversity in the tech sector.

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It’s the structured sister to Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, and it provides a common place to gather and re-distribute data that can be reused by anyone.

In this short event we’ll be examining what it is possible to do with Wikidata - using UK political data as a springboard. Whether you are interested in building an application, doing some analysis, or just experimenting, this is for you.

This workshop will be divided into two parts:

A brief introduction to Wikidata: cool tools and tricks for using it

A hackathon to use, visualise and improve the data

Join us if you’re interested in learning some new tricks, or to understand how Wikidata can be useful to your work or your organisation. If you’re interested in political data, or have experience in visualising or building tools to work with data, come along!

Julio Alejandro is director of three Blockchain companies in London, UK Foreign Correspondent for Excelsior, Founder & CEO of Humanitarian Blockchain. He has lectured, lobbied, and participated in transnational projects with the United Nations, the European Union, and the University of Cambridge.

This month we’re looking at the various routes people have taken to become Service Designers and the skills needed to succeed.

How does a doctor become a service designer?

How could a background in music help in the design process?

Do service design courses prepare you for life as a jobbing designer?

Why do so many UXers make the leap?

Our fascinating speakers will be telling us a little bit about their personal experience and ruminate on the essential skills needed to make a great Service Designer.

If you’re thinking of becoming a Service Designer this event will help you understand the may and varied routes that your peers have taken before you. If you’re a seasoned-hand it will remind you of the diversity of experience and how vital that makes our discipline.

This session will think about the most engaging and fruitful ways of connecting our membership into the work of the Project, as we develop the Ethical Framework that will underpin a Progressive Ethics (for more detail about this, look here - exciting and effective ideas have been developed).

This membership has built itself - there has been no outreach, no large event, no recruitment drive - the idea of a Progressive Ethics clearly has the potential to engage.

Looking through the list, the signs are that we are an excitingly diverse bunch, with a wide range of interests and skills.

Clearly, not all members will come to Working Session events (although they are engaging and exciting experiences - do give it a try!), but people don’t join a Project without some idea of contributing to its development: at this session we will come up with ways of opening participation and engagement out beyond physical Meetups.

This session is a complete event, with its own topic for discussion and consideration, built around the idea of participatory development - no prior engagement is necessary! No future commitment is required!

Assemblies for Democracy will be having another planning group meeting at Newspeak House to prepare the meeting for an alliance for a citizens’ convention on the constitution. Any interested observers are most welcome to attend.

On Wednesday 3rd August our friend and colleague @MalwareTechBlog was arrested by the FBI in Las Vegas after the Defcon/Blackhat security conventions.

Many know him for his integral role in helping analyse, explain and mitigate the WannaCry ransomware worm - particularly for registering the sinkhole domain which slowed the attack and saved upwards of millions of computers from infection and inestimable damages.

In the UK and possibly elsewhere, it is entirely plausible that his heroic contributions prevented loss or injury to human lives.

MalwareTech has been indicted by the US DOJ and faces charges relating to alleged involvement in the Kronos banking malware in 2014-2015. No evidence has been presented at this stage to substantiate the claims and under US and international law he is considered innocent until proven otherwise.

Understandable concern is being felt and important questions are raised regarding how a UK citizen and highly-regarded member of the security researcher community came to be arrested by US authorities. The possibility of decades of imprisonment due to the disproportionately harsh sentencing regime in the USA compared to the UK and the prevalence of coercive plea-bargaining give cause for significant alarm.

Within the community of information security researchers and practitioners the dangers of being criminalised for efforts to address malware and improve computer security are all-to-familiar. With the arrest of MalwareTech, especially after such conspicuous and laudable contributions in responding to cyberattacks, there is a serious risk that the already strained trust between the hacker community and law-enforcement and government authorities will be eroded further and significant “chilling effects” on the willingness of volunteers to assist with computer security will be felt at a time when their help is most needed.

We owe it to our friend and colleague, to his family and loved ones, to ourselves as a community and society at large to ensure that MalwareTech’s rights are upheld, that his brilliant potential to contribute to our collective security is not squandered, and that relations between the hacker community and state authorities are not harmed for the common goal of maintaining internet and private computer security.

Please attend if you are able, or contribute remotely, so that we can respond together in an effective and responsible manner to resolving this situation in the best interests of everybody concerned.

Tech Against Modern Slavery is an event in aid of World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, brought to you by Free_D and the London Tech for Good Meetup to raise the profile of human trafficking and explore tech’s role in addressing it.

Human trafficking is a crime that exploits women, children and men for numerous purposes including forced labour and sex. The International Labour Organization estimates that 21 million people are victims of forced labour globally. This estimate also includes victims of human trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation. While it is not known how many of these victims were trafficked, the estimate implies that currently, there are millions of trafficking in persons victims in the world (http://www.un.org/en/events/humantrafficking/)

This event will explore tech’s role and responsibility in prevention, prosecution, rescue, and reintegration; from the perspectives of charities, startups and big tech companies.

We’ll be hearing talks from:

Siavash Mahdavi, tech entrepreneur & co-founder of Free_D

Phil Bennett, Program Architect at Salesforce

And a panel discussion from:

Katherine Prescott, co-founder of Free_D

Gail Kent, Global Public Policy Manager, Facebook

Justine Currell, Executive Director, Unseen

Sarah Brown, Lead Analyst, Stop the Traffik

Min Teo, Strategy, Techfugees

Hosts:

Jessica Stacey, London Tech for Good & Bethnal Green Ventures

Ellie Hale, London Tech for Good & CAST

Doors open at 6 pm, talks start at 6:30 pm. There will be time for questions and networking after the panel discussion.

Join MakeSense with Local Welcome and their communities at Lunchtime on Sunday 30th of July for what is promised to be a very unique Holdup, MakeSense Design Thinking Workshop!

Come to Connect, Cook, Eat and experience first hand what the project is and who the project serves… and then Challenge yourself brainstorming and building a strategy to grow the Local Welcome movement!

Local Welcome project combines digital service design with traditional community organising. At the heart of it, they help refugees and locals cook and eat together. The experience of this shared activity helps atomised communities build solidarity and find common ground. They spent 2016 running test events throughout the UK, in Berlin and the States, connecting small groups of Syrian refugees and local residents to cook and eat together.

Now its time for them to do the next important step!

Everybody is Welcome! Due to the challenge we think that people who loves and practice User Research and Design, Marketing Campaigns and Community Building will LOVE to be part of this challenge. Let’s solve this all together!

Don’t be Late! We recommend to arrive at 11:50am, because at 12:00pm we start our group activities.

MakeSense is an international community that rallies SenseMakers in 128 cities across the world to help social entrepreneurs to solve their challenges. By putting together our skills and ideas, we can help social entrepreneurs create and develop their businesses and solve the most pressing issues faced by society in such areas as: education, health, environment, food, waste, refugees, etc.
MakeSense is all of us. It’s an open project that brings together a community of passionate people.

A special event featuring Peter Krafft who has just finished his PhD at MIT Media Lab.

In his own words:

In my work, I develop computational models to reveal patterns in human social behavior and computational perspectives to guide that behavioral modeling. In this talk I will present a modeling framework I have developed that organizes my own thinking about the structure and function of social systems. I will then present varied models that can reveal topic-specific communication networks in complex organizations, information silos during rumor spreading, and political preferences in the American electorate. I will conclude with a discussion of potential future areas of interest to me, including participatory mechanism design, computational political theory, models of public engagement with science and technology, and models of “fake news”.

Talk followed by drinks & discussion.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Sophie.

A meeting to discuss James Darling’s Membership Relationship Management Prototype:

“The majority of successful digital products in existence today are built on two possible organisational models: atomised individuals interacting with each other, or a centralised organisation (typically a company) interacting with its users (typically customers).

You can see this forced dichotomy playing out in the language of [the campaign] sector; you have ‘traditional organisations’ trying (and mostly failing) to engage with the ‘grassroots’. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but neither are particularly effective in 2017.

Traditional organisations are pulled into creating bureaucracies that are better suited to a corporate company of the 1990s. ‘Volunteers’ suddenly have to behave more like staff members, while new members who are unable or not yet willing to make such commitments begin to see the organisation as a professionalised company to be a customer of, rather than an active member.

Meanwhile, grassroots organisations struggle to create any useful bureaucracies at all, rapidly collapsing under their own weight if they try to expand or build power. They are too risky for power to engage with seriously. Without simple, public ways for new members to get involved, they often end up cliquey.

I feel there is the possibility to build new bureaucracies, largely written in open source code instead of rulebooks (because it’s 2017), that break down this dichotomy, and allow smaller grassroots teams to help and be helped by the more centralised and professionalised HQ. This prototype was a stab at that.”

Digital Democracy is a question that has been heavily debated in recent years at a time of intense development of practices of online decision-making. New digital democracy softwares, online services and applications are all manifestations of the vitality of this discussion, as are initiatives and experimentations launched by both emerging and established political parties, national parliaments and city councils.

However, often we are overlooking the degree to which the common label “digital democracy” hides the presence of a great diversity of directions and approaches. While some of these practices project the vision of a direct democracy, in which participatory practices can wholly substitute all forms of representation, other lines of development take a more pragmatic view, seeing digital democracy as a way to address some of the inconsistencies of representative democracy, and constructing a continuous feedback loop between represented and representatives.

How do these competing visions of digital democracy, the participatory and representative ones map onto existing practices and projects? What are their underlying criteria, visions, and claims to legitimacy? Which of these models of digital democracy is more effective and which one is destined to prevail in the long run?

The workshop will bring together theorists and practitioners of digital democracy from different European countries to explore the emergence of competing models of digital democracy, their theoretical inspirations and their practical developments.

The film “Waynak”, which means “Where are you” in Arabic, is a six-part web documentary which was filmed in 2016 and produced by MakeSense presents men and women who have developed practical solutions (from arts, to theatre and technology) to problems encountered by refugees, and shows us how to move from screen to reality.

In the last session, we looked at the components (technical and social) that could be assembled to build a bullshit detection system.

Discussion of each of these components generated questions, alternative approaches, awkward issues.

This session , we will look in more detail at a particular component that is part of the imagined ethical engagement system this Project is aiming for - an ethical chat-bot.

Why a chat-bot? Well, when thinking about building an ethical framework that can engage widely - both to help them traverse the ethical frameworks we might build, and to learn from people about the questions and the ethics that they might bring to bear - some sort of simple ethical chat-bot always seems like something to explore.

What would people want from such a thing? What should it try to do? What should it try not to do? Could it be used as an aid in building ethical frameworks? Can we allow it to give automated ethical suggestions - or should these always come from people?

No doubt we’ll come up with many more questions, and many answers too.

What we’ll aim for is a ‘starter-for-ten’ specification for what an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) ethical chat-bot should do.

Includes so many elections, much data! And we want your braaains on what’s next…

(Democracy Club is a community interest company that uses open data, design and technology to give every voter the information and participation opportunities they need, in a way that suits them. We are non-partisan and we work openly. Come say hello!)

A breakfast event looking at how product and behavioural design principles could be used to improve the policy-making process, with the idea of bringing together a mix of product designers, behavioural scientists along with policy-makers/civil servants to investigate the idea of how we can create a ‘well-designed democracy’.

We’re delighted to say we’ve got some excellent speakers confirmed:

Dr Michael Hallsworth, Director at the Behavioural Insights Team – on using behavioural economics to design better policies

Temi Ogunye, Citizens Advice Bureau – presenting research on how people practically engage with democracy from a day-to-day perspective

Chris Quigley, Delib – on ‘playocracy’: the use of gaming mechanics to build engagement in policy

Breakfast will be provided and, of course, there’ll be plenty of tea and coffee available.

This event is part of the Practical Democracy Project, a series of events organised by Delib dedicated to looking at how technology can best be used to make every-day improvements to the democratic process – with a particular focus on policy-making at local and central government levels.

The overall aim of the Practical Democracy Project is to design the ‘ultimate democracy user-journey’. On one side, we’ll be mapping out in practical terms how to create the best democratic user-journey for citizens, using technologies that dominate people’s everyday lives; on the other side, we’ll be mapping out the optimal user-journey for government officials/policy makers/elected officials. The key point being that democratic processes are a two-sided affair, which need to be optimised for both citizens and government if they’re to work.

For more info or to kick in ideas, drop us a line on Twitter: @delibthinks

The sell out corn-based snack event of the quarter is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in Campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2, Let Toys be Toys, Transform Justice and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Speakers

Sam Jeffers (The Shop) - Who targets you? The inside scoop and results of the elections most talked about new tools

Hayley Davidson (Crisis Action) - Creative Coalitions

We’ll be unveiling a further list of kick-ass speakers for this event over the coming weeks. Expect more learnings from the snap General Election campaign to be among them.

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non-alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

If we can we will try and organise some pizza to be delivered after the event to allow people to keep talking.

homelesshack17 is for anyone interested in helping solve homelessness in this city and beyond.

According to Crisis, more than 8,000 people slept rough in London last year. That number has doubled since 2010. The problem is much bigger than that, though - more than 100,000 people each year apply to UK local councils for help with homelessness, and that number is increasing by more than 10% a year.

Experts from charities, service providers and government will come together with service designers, policy professionals, data analysts, developers, researchers and people with lived experience to see if we can create some useful things to help.

There will be people who know what’s needed, people who know what data is available and where to find it, and people who can take on the ideas and prototypes from the event and find ways to make them happen.

Friday 23rd June

10:00 to 12:30: presentations from experts who work on homelessness in London to help hackers understand what’s needed

13:30 to 17:00: open space style event for everyone to talk about their ideas for ways to help

17:00 to 23:59: form self-organising teams and get to work

Saturday 24th June

09:00 to 16:00: work in self-organising teams to design solutions and build working prototypes

16:00 to 17:00: show and tell

17:00: finish

Everyone with energy and ideas is welcome. This will be an inclusive, open and collaborative event. #Homelesshack is not only for people with special technical skills - come along if you have ideas, energy and any relevant skills or knowledge to offer. Please don’t worry if it’s your first time at an event like this - everyone is welcome and there will be plenty of help and support on offer.

A short introduction, followed by discussion, then for those who want to (everyone, hopefully!), a workshop session.

We’ll develop practical ideas for how a framework of entities, each taking responsibility for some aspect of an issue, can work together to make efficient and effective assessments.

We’ll think about how these entities can operate both as algorithms and as human-powered decision makers.

This is about starting to develop a product - the relationships and mechanisms we’ll develop will underpin the workings of an ethical framework that can interact, can deliberate, can make recommendations.

On Sunday 4th June election fever will be in the air: candidates crying clockwork catchphrases, pundits pontificating on polls, every citizen considering the choices before them. In other words, the perfect time for an election hackathon!

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism.

It’s been four years since the tragic events at Rana Plaza, where lack of safety and humane working conditions were exposed due to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. This FlashHacks, we’ll be digging into the corporate network of apparel brands.

“There was barely any publicly available information about the apparel brands that were using the Rana Plaza factories. Activists searched through the rubble for labels and interviewed survivors. For decades, such secrecy has been the norm in the garment industry. While a handful of companies, like Adidas, Nike, Levi’s, Puma, and Patagonia, began publishing details more than a decade ago, others have recently joined. By the end of 2016, at least 29 apparel companies were disclosing some information about their source factories. Yet, company commitments to transparency about supplier information are inconsistent, with widely varying standards for what they choose to disclose. Many brands have held out completely.” - Human Rights Watch

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 125 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Join us for the launch party of CorbynRun, a game about building a movement to beat the Tories. You’ll get to try the game and chat to the makers.

Games can change the way you think. They’re more than just entertainment, they can help engage, teach, influence, spark conversations and start movements for change… and perhaps have an impact in the election.

What is Games For The Many?

Games For The Many is a new grouping of Labour members, creatives, gamers and tech enthusiasts, passionate about making games. From Melenchon’s Fiscal Kombat, to Molleindustria’s Phone Story, to UsVsTh3m’s 2010 viral election games - games have shown a meaningful capacity to help promote and develop ideas and messages, and they’re fun to boot!

This Meetup is going to bring together people and organizations working in (open) data for development.

We will feature speakers whose organizations have launched or are soon to launch a data portal for development purposes, speakers that will discuss responsible data handling for development, and others who are using large tranches of data to inform their work.

While we have some speakers secured already, we encourage anyone working on an exciting (open) data for development project to get in touch for an opportunity to speak!

How can decentralised technology change management, incentives and discovery in attention-content markets?

In today’s attention-based economy, institutions who hold power over data access and discovery can dictate what content and collaborations will be successful and what we spend our attention on.

Paweł Wojtkiewicz is a data scientist and phd candidate from Warsaw School of Economics. He will talk about his work implementing a system that manages and incentivises the creation and spread of content that people find beneficial while creating transparent environments where singular content creators and normal viewers can thrive as individual units.

Design Jam is a one-day brief to prototype event to work cool disruptive topics. This Jam’s theme will be politics and the upcoming election with the final brief being announced on the day of the Jam.

Why? We want to meet people, make things, learn, have fun doing it, and build a community of awesome people.

I’ve never Jammed before. What should I bring? Bring your laptops, coding environments, iPhones and iPads, Sketchpads, writing / drawing implements, cameras and video cameras, and whatever else you need to make sweet stuff. We’ll be finding ways of creating quick-and-dirty prototypes for testing, and then building convincing mockups by the end of the day.

Here’s the schedule (we try to stick to this, but we can change it up too):

10:00 - Topic presentation! We’ll give you some background and inspiration to get started with.

10:30 - Making teams and brainstorming session 1! Each team member will do rapid sketches of 4-8 different ideas. Then we’ll put them up, discuss and prioritise.

11:00 - Brainstorming session 2! Each team member will sketch a single idea. Then we’ll dot-vote and choose direction.

11:30 - Team discussion & finalizing idea

12:00 - Break for lunch

13:00 - Building your prototype begins here! This can be a sketch, paper prototype, html click dummy, a website, a video about your service or anything else that can be used for quick and dirty testing with real people.

15:30 - Testing with peers and on the streets!

16:00 - Prototyping, round 2! Refine Refine Refine!

17:30 - Finalise your presentations! Make them awesome, have fun!!!

18:00 - Final Presentations We’ll take 5 minutes with each project and see what you’ve built, and what you’ve learned.

19:00 - End of the day We’ll head to a local pub to celebrate and generally have a great time :)

This is an opportunity for community activists and voluntary organisations in London to get support for their priorities in this election.

We will focus on three sets of questions:

What are your priorities, who has similar priorities & how can we work together to achieve them?

What is the London manifesto and how can you use it?

How can you influence candidates to support your priorities?

Election campaigns are a national conversation about priorities. While most attention is on competing candidates and Brexit, the election is also a chance for you to draw attention to issues in your community, tell politicians what you want and get their support.

Key facilitators / presenters:

Titus Alexander, Democracy Matters – top tips for influencing

Matt Scott, LVSC – update on London manifesto

Women’s Resource Centre / ROTA

Community Sector Coalition – update on manifesto (tbc)

David Wilcox, Social Reporter- Networked City / Connecting Londoners

Newspeak House fellows – Josh; Edward tbc

Just Space – Richard Lee tbc

We will have refreshments, small groups discussions and a plenary to share ideas and get support for what you want out of the election.

Come along and get support for what you want politicians to do for your community and for London.

Come and celebrate three years of WebRoots Democracy by attending this year’s anniversary event: take back ctrl: digital democracy, post-brexit

After the ground-breaking referendum last June, we will be looking at the future of digital democracy in the UK, setting out WebRoots Democracy’s next steps, and bringing together those in the democratic participation and civic tech fields.

A drinks reception to celebrate the launch of Jamie Bartlett’s new book Radicals.

Based on two years of field work, Radicals follows the people and ideas of outsider political movements, from psychedelic pioneers searching for oneness to futurists promising immortality to anarcho-capitalists founding new nations to communes trying to create a new model for life. As the mainstream of politics seems to hollow out, Radicals poses the question: are these groups the future of politics?

Join for drinks and snacks, perhaps even some very light conversation about politics that is definitely not business as usual.

History Hack is an experiment to see what happens when you get technologists to read classics from the history of technology. Before each episode we’ll all read a text. Then we will meet up for a hack where we use the ideas from the reading to build amazing new things.

Episode 1 starts with an absolute classic: Langdon Winner’s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Winner explores a radical idea: technologies aren’t neutral inanimate objects. They have political agendas just like humans do. The essay totally reshaped the field. Let’s explore how it can reshape the way we build things.

Read the essay. Then come to Newspeak ready to brainstorm and be creative.

Journalist and filmmaker Billie JD Porter (BBC3, Channel 4, Vice) and ThinkNation invite you to an urgent summit addressing the state of political engagement across the UK.

It is a critical time for people across the UK, and on June 8, a decision will be made by all those who choose to vote. The third major vote in two years, constituents across all generations are said to already be ‘fatigued’ by the prospect of once again returning to the polling booth, but young people’s future remains at stake.

The event will be opened with the screening of “USE YOUR VOICE” - a short film that explores political disenfranchisement of the younger generation.

The film will be followed by a series of short interviews live on stage with Summit host Billie, mixed with talks and audience discussions with thought leaders across media, education, politics. Crucially, young people will be speaking on behalf of themselves.

Our agenda is not to sway people’s vote, but to call a state of emergency in encouraging young people TO vote.

8.30-8.55pm: “How can we make sense of politics in the new media age?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A

8.55pm-9.20pm “Shouldn’t politics belong to everyone?” Panel discussion followed by audience Q&A9:20pm: Launch of Use Your Voice: The Toolkit. Billie is joined by with three young people who will explain why the Toolkit is important.

We’ll start with a short presentation on how the Ethical Framework is currently imagined - how it works, how it gets built, how it can be used.

Then we’ll get some proposals for ethical dilemmas that we can explore - choose two or three, and explore the ethical issues they raise - and work out the Ethical propositions that capture these issues.

We’ll make linkages between these, look for patterns that underly and unify them, perhaps, discuss their characteristics (what specifics of the problem affect how they apply? Do they interact with other issues? What is their relative importance?).

We’ll explore using Kumu to capture and represent all of this, and see how we can link these issues together, beginning to see what a network of ethical propositions looks like.

On the 11th of May, each councils will release a document called a Statements of Persons Nominated, which details the candidates for the upcoming election. We need to manually enter this information into a database so that more useful things can be done with it. Come and help!

Newspeak House Fellow Alex Parsons went to TicTec 2017, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference focused on the impact that civic technology and digital democracy are having on citizens, decision makers and governments around the world.

Come and join us this Saturday to collaborate in the creation of online and offline tools to support voters to access the information they need to decide who to vote for in GE2017.

We can think of 4 themes to work around that might provide a useful focus for the day but are happy to hear other proposals at the start of the event when we’ll use an ‘OpenSpace’ approach to chose what topics to work on. This builds on much of the work that’s been happening in the past days and weeks.

We invite people with skills in UI, digital, data, political science, activism, media and communications to join us for a co-design session to build on and contribute to a range of initiatives which aim to build a progressive alliance and enable data-informed tactical voting on 8 June.

In the past months, speculation over whether Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will run for president has intensified. After the Trump victory, nothing of this sort seems impossible. Would such a shift establish a democratic tech utopia - or would it marginalise dissent in a way unseen even in 20th century dictatorships?

Freedom of Information and Openness - why bother? The past, present and future of transparency in the UK

This event looks at why politicians push openness, how they try and back out of it and what happens once the policies are in place. It will look across FOI and Open Data in the UK and offer some thoughts on what may happen to the transparency agenda with Brexit.

Speakers

Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck College, University of London

Martin Rosenbaum, BBC, FOI expert

The discussion coincides with the publication of Ben’s new book on this topic, ‘The Politics of Freedom of Information: How and Why Governments Pass Laws That Threaten Their Power’. The first chapter is available online here.

Join ORG London for a discussion with ORG Legal Director Myles Jackman and feminist pornographer and sexual liberties campaigner Pandora Blake, about the Digital Economy Bill and what it could mean for you.

Myles Jackman who once described online pornography as “the canary in the coalmine of free speech” and is best known for his cutting edge practice in obscenity law and sexual freedom of expression.

Pandora campaigns for sexual freedom, read her Guardian article about the Bill link

The sell out corn-based snack event of the quarter is back. It’s Wine and Wotsits time.

You say wot?

That’s right, there aren’t enough wotsits in Campaigners lives, so a few times a year we co-ordinate people coming together to share some of their successes. It’s a pecha kucha format, which means approx 5 presentations of 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds.

It will be an opportunity to hear from cutting edge speakers doing exciting things. Previous speakers include those from Save the Children, Shelter, WWF, Unlock Democracy, Which?, Change.org, National Autistic Society, Care2 and many more. If you have something you’d love to talk about, please let us know!

Who is speaking?

We will be unveiling our full speaker line up over the coming week but it includes

Rachel Collinson - Donor Whisper for most of the big charities you have ever come across!

… and more to come.

How many tickets are there?

A limited number, we generally have a waitlist, so sign up early. We try and fit in as many people as we can.

How does it work?

You show up with whatever you want to drink (wine, fizz, non alcoholic, whatever takes your fancy), we provide the wotsits and some cups. You have a great evening. It’s deliberately timed to allow people to come straight from work.

Join us for the launch of the OpenOwnership Register: an open data register of global beneficial ownership, in the public interest.

The revelations of the Panama Papers have shown that anonymous company ownership bears an unacceptably high cost for society and business. On the anniversary of this game-changing leak, we are launching a tool that will bring information about who owns companies out into the open. By linking beneficial ownership data from worldwide corporate registries and other sources, and by providing a clear, consistent mechanism for data collection, the OpenOwnership Register will help reveal the transnational connections between people and companies and build a culture of corporate transparency.

Get a first look at the pilot version of the OpenOwnership Register.

Take a tour of the platform and learn how it will enable governments to crack down on crime, allow companies to verify who they are really doing business with and empower civil society to investigate and campaign against injustice.

The launch will be webcast worldwide. We welcome your questions before or during the launch on the Twitter hashtag #OpenOwnership or via email to info@openownership.org.

Timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Panama Papers leaks, this event will convene a range of journalist, data/tech and civil society actors to share research and findings released in the year since the leaks, share plans and brainstorm collective actions to make progress.

Programme:

8:30 Registration

9:00 Introduction, by Gerard Ryle, Director, ICIJ

9:15 – 10:45 MiddleMen, Mansions & Maseratis: new research and tools

Drew Sullivan, OCCRP on brand new leaks

Max Heywood, Transparency International on brand new research on money laundering through luxury goods

• Ever found yourself stuck behind a corporate desk wondering what happened to your dreams of changing the world?

• Ever wondered how to leverage the resources of your company for global justice causes?

• Ever wanted to meet other young professionals with a similar passion for doing good?

EA Workplace Activism is a new project aimed at answering these questions - we use the power of our workplaces to maximise our positive impact, and help others do the same. You can make a real difference within and through your company - come and find out how at this informal, discussion-based event. Tickets are free via Eventbrite. We have a few speakers:

• Jo Macrae (GiveDirectly & former Head of UK Humanitarian Policy). Speaking about GiveDirectly’s pioneering work to administer direct cash transfers to the poorest households in East Africa.

• George Howlett (EA Workplace Activism/CEA). Giving an overview of our workplace activism to date, and discussing how we can leverage corporate resources for high-impact causes.

Miles Brundage - Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future for Humanity Institute and a PhD candidate at Arizona State University in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. His research is focused on policy challenges in artificial intelligence. He is also affiliated with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation (VIRI), and the Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI). Miles will be talking about progress in AI and its long-term policy implications.

If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Shad.

What we believe about the world affects the decisions we make every day, whether we are citizens or presidents. Bad information means bad decisions, and it corrodes trust. Join us and our special guests on the 27th of March at Newspeak House in London to discuss fake news and the misinformation ecosystem, and how best to respond.

The Panel

Richard Allan, Vice President Public Policy EMEA at Facebook

Peter Barron, Vice President Communications and Public Affairs EMEA at Google

Rob Owers, Head of News Partnerships EMEA at Twitter

Jenni Sargent, Managing Director at First Draft News

Will Moy, Director at Full Fact

The Host

Bill Thompson, BBC

The Event

Full Fact is the UK’s leading factchecking charity, and has been at the forefront of automated factchecking. We’ve been to a lot of events about fake news recently, but none quite provided the opportunity for people to hear directly from the key players. So we organised this. We hope you enjoy the evening. The event will be live streamed. You can follow the Full Fact twitter account on the night for the live feed. Tickets are free. However, Full Fact is a charity, so if you would like to donate we would be very grateful.

An evening for all freelancers to learn about setting up cooperatives.

Self-employment is booming in the capital. Freelancing can be liberating, but all too often this comes at a price: isolation, precariousness and insecure pay.

Join us for an evening of discussion, meeting like-minded freelancers, and hearing from speakers including Pat Conaty and Alex Bird (Co-operatives UK), and Kayleigh Walsh (Outlandish - a tech cooperative of freelancers).

Come to the launch of “The Mask and The Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest” by Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.

From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debout in Paris, contemporary protest bears the mark of citizenism, a libertarian and participatory brand of populism which appeals to ordinary citizens outraged at the arrogance of political and financial elites in the wake of the Great Recession.

The book draws from 140 interviews with activists and live witnesses of occupations and demonstrations to explore the new politics nurtured by the movement of the squares of 2011-16 and its reflection of an exceptional phase of crisis and social transformation.

7:30 Paolo will present his book and discuss the relevance of the progressive populism of the 2011 occupy wave for contemporary politics

8:00 Response by journalist and author Dan Hancox

8:30 Debate

9:00 Drinks & mingling, and the chance to buy signed copies of the book.

At its heart, Open Research Data is about making it easy for you and others to see, use and share data (to find out more, read this). This simple idea is powering some of the largest breakthroughs of our time and our event aims to celebrate and accelerate the power of Open Research Data.

We invite you, whether new or old to Open Research Data, scholar or citizen, in London or across the globe, to join us for this weekend to make, hack, contribute, try, teach, design, test, learn (or just about anything!) in the name of Open Research Data.

In London, we’ll provide fast wifi, power (both for your laptops and your bodies) and a program that will spark ideas and collaborations for the weekend.

Program

Each day will run 9am - 6pm. We’ll provide breakfast, lunch, and snacks (including coffee, of course) with informal dinner & drinks each evening. The program is designed to be lightweight and flexible to allow the maximum time for doing.

Day one

9-10 am: Breakfast

10-12 am: Introductions & opening / pitches

12-1 pm: Lunch

1-6pm: Working with occasional lightning talks

Day two

9-10 am: Breakfast

10-12 am: Working with occasional lightning talks

12-1 pm: Lunch

1-6 pm: Working with occasional lightning talks

Ideas for the Weekend

We’re organizing ideas & more details on the program here. It’s up for you to decide how you spend the weekend, but if you’re short on ideas, here are some of ours:

Trying to find / reuse an open data set

Building engaging (and open) visualizations of open research data

Adding some field-specific examples to Data Carpentry lessons

Building a software library (Python module/ R package/ Ruby gem etc.) to facilitate access to and processing of open data from specific sources

Building a set of Wikidata SPARQL queries for a specific field

Harvesting data from the supplementary files of scholarly publications

Participating in research-related activities that others are planning for Open Data Day

A data-centric walk around the neighbourhood

Improving documentation for any of the above

Adding a “research data” section to the Open Data Handbook

Improving Wikipedia pages around or with open research data

Writing data management plans

Writing data-centric grant proposals

Make your own data FAIR

Test out reproducible computational tools such as Binder, R-Shiny, CodeOcean [we can supply a list of resources]

Prototype a tool to leverage the open datasets in eLife or in repositories (Zenodo, Dataverse, etc)

Prototype a tool to make it easy for researchers to share/discover/consume comprehensive, open and FAIR data

Devise a mechanism to incentivise deposition, review and reuse of datasets

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism.

We’re turning the monthly FlashHacks into every few months to make sure we can accommodate more people & partner with NGOs. We’ll be releasing more information in the lead up to the event!

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 125 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Since the last People Before Pixels meetup, almost a year ago, a lot has happened politically and in how we design public sector services. But we’ve seen the rise of one question that now seems to dominates both: who do you work for?

The language we use to describe the people who use public sector services has been changing. ‘Human centred design’ has turned to ‘user experience’ and now to ‘designing for citizens’. How has this impacted the way we include people who use digital services? How do we talk about individual users as a group of people? And how do these groupings change our expectations of their behaviour? Will designing for citizens empower people using public sector services? What are the user needs for empowerment and how will we design for it?

How can digital tools be used to make information on agriculture development funding more accessible, and more actionable?

Join us to hear pitches from expert developers from across the world - sharing their plans to use state-of-the-art technology to improve aid and agriculture data.

This session is a public culmination of a week-long tool accelerator. Hear insights from our panel of judges, and provide your questions and feedback through an audience-choice session.

About the Initiative for Open Ag Funding

The Initiative for Open Ag Funding supports efforts to tackle hunger and food insecurity by improving the availability and quality of agricultural investment data. We know that in 2014 roughly $8.3 billion of official development assistance (ODA) was disbursed for agricultural-related development. However, we cannot accurately say where it was spent, who benefited or what that assistance achieved.

The Initiative for Open Ag Funding is aimed at ensuring that agriculture and food security practitioners have the data they need to answer those questions, with the ultimate goal of increasing the effectiveness of efforts in the sector. By improving access to this data, organizations will be better able to coordinate, find partners, identify promising approaches and target their assistance.

To that end, we are hosting a four day tool development workshop where specialist software developers will explore agriculture-relevant data needs, and build a series of prototype tools to address them. These include:

We are not the only sufferers of ugly referendums. In Colombia, a recent national vote to end a fifty year war with the FARC guerrillas failed by 50.2% to 49.8%.

Ed Maklouf has just returned from three months living with and studying the political processes of remote Colombian communities: the FARC guerrillas, indigenous Arhuaco indians and Amazonian indians, afrodescendiente communities, and citizens of Bogota, Cali, and Medellin.

Come and hear about the history of their local decision-making processes, how their communities understood and responded to the peace referendum, and Ed’s experiments augmenting their politics with new technology. A talk followed by discussion.

Ed is writing a book about consensus “Hands Up - the history of voting” and is the founder of Gather, a social impact startup that makes democracy tech for citizen science, citizen reporting, and voting/consensus. He studied group communication at Stanford University, developed the Siine Keyboard, and now aims to improve collective agreements using both technology and historical research.

How well are we using online and digital technology to take part in politics? Do platforms already exist for engaging with politics from a local to European level, or do we need to create something new? If so what, and how?

Bring your ears and your ideas to explore with others which online tools/platforms could be most powerful for people to engage with politicians and help you get your opinions heard where it matters.

You’ll have the opportunity to meet a variety of international people with expertise in the field of digital democracy, but we want to hear your expertise too. We hope you will develop thoughts and ideas about how you would like to engage in politics and input your ideas - whether you know a little or a lot!

Be part of an international programme - this event is part of a series being run in Paris, Iceland, Latvia, Slovenia, Amsterdam, Athens and Brussels as part of a European Commission funded investigation into how best to engage people with legislation making. It aims to explore the tools available and crowdsource the requirements for engaging citizens.

How do we give power to the people - could digital democracy be the answer? Be part of deciding the future. Priority on the waitlist for tickets will be given to people aged 30 and under.

Jonathan Penn - Jonnie Penn is a doctoral candidate and Rausing, Williamson and Lipton scholar at the University of Cambridge. His current research explores the history of artificial intelligence, 1950-69.

Dhruv Ghulati - Dhruv is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factmata, an artificial intelligence startup solving the problem of automatic fact checking, rumour detection and fake news detection using natural language processing. Dhruv will be talking about the role of fact checking and fake news in today’s society.

Sam Applebee - Sam is the founder of Super Global, a social enterprise connecting humanitarian projects with expert technologists. At AI startup Satalia he explores the role of organisational purpose for AI companies. He holds an MSc in Global Governance. Sam will talk about openings for AI-stack technologies in civil society, and pose some challenges to cooperation.

Others TBC. If you’d be interested in speaking at this or future meetups, please contact Shad.

The Housing crisis is a ‘wicked’ problem, with multiple causes and effects. Clearly though, a key piece of the puzzle lies in the way we finance the development of new homes. Throughout much of the 20th century, we have largely been dependent on the speculative land development to finance the delivery of new homes, typically financed by short-term loans from major banks.

As that model becomes increasingly less viable in many areas, as other diverse modes of development grow and as digital technology allows more kinds of lending and contract-making, what new innovative models can we imagine to finance homes and neighbourhoods in the 21st century?

Through hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, Debt Resistance UK have obtained a dataset of LOBO loan contracts. These are risky and expensive loans miss-sold to local authority by financial institutions, to the detriment of public services.

We’ve already processed much of the information, but by opening it up to others we can realise its value. So join us on the hack day, to make new analyses or visualisations, to help complete the dataset or just to get to know others working on pressing issues in local finance.

An important debate over ethical principles has become overdue. Should the widespread disruptions of the digital age alter our conceptions about morality and ethics? Which ethical principles from previous eras should we continue to uphold (perhaps with extra urgency)? Are there new considerations and realisations that we would want to inform our decisions about the future of technology and the future of humanity? In such discussions, what should our starting point be?

Rapidly advancing technology is placing within our reach unprecedented power to remake human bodies, human minds, and human society. Age-old constraints and limitations are being swept aside. But just because we now have the opportunity to remould human character, it does not follow that we should take these steps. If our viewpoint is too short-sighted, or too techno-centric, we might miss the bigger picture. We might edit key features of human nature in ways we’ll soon come to regret. Like King Midas of old, we may discover that our wishes have devastatingly bad consequences.

This is no mere academic discussion. It has profound real-world consequences. Engineers are awaiting input from philosophers for the “moral guidance” modules of powerful new robots and AIs. Politicians, likewise, are looking around for assistance in drafting legislation governing new technology. What advice should we be offering?

The panellists:

Dr. Stephen Minger, former Chief Scientist, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, and former Senior Lecturer in Stem Cell Biology at Kings College London

This group is for people who are interested in the future and maybe want to help shape it.

The acceleration of technology means that the near future may bring radical changes to all of us. Major developments in technologies like anti-aging, nanotech, genetics, computing, robotics, and geo-engineering are going to make the next few years very exciting - and possibly also very dangerous. We could gain god-like powers - but we might also lose sight of our humanity, and destroy everything that we used to hold dear.

What’s your view? Are things improving? Too slowly or too quickly? Are we are entering a new golden age? Or is the potential “Technological Singularity” something to fear? What does it mean to talk about “Human 2.0” and “Humanity+”? Or perhaps you view such talk as techno-hype? Maybe you just like the practical side of technology and want to find out more about possible paradigm shifts?

Anybody is welcome to this group - you don’t have to be a Techno Geek or work for some futuristic company to be in our group. The future applies to us all!

Come join in the debate - have your opinions voiced and maybe make some interesting new friends.

All we ask is that members treat each other with the respect they would want for themselves. Our group has members of many ages and backrounds. We have many different perspectives on what the future may bring and like to share different ideas with each other. We approach the future with a open mind and sense of humility. Our group mission is to introduce you to some of the ideas, advancements and people who are making our future happen today.

“GlobalNet21 is the leading forum in the UK for discussing the major issues in the 21st Century. We share a common concern for the sustainability of both our planet and the people on it. With almost 20,000 network members in the UK and abroad, we are making the debate, and democracy, more accessible by enlarging the Public Square and using social networks.

“As well as a network of individuals we have also set up a collaborative network of organisations to exchange good practice and transfer knowledge so that we can learn from each other. This network is cross boundary and includes local authorities, housing associations, universities, community groups and social enterprises. Our aim is through dialogue to celebrate diversity and develop community self-resilience and sustainability at a time of unprecedented social and environmental change.”

To avoid over-crowding, entrance will be strictly limited to people who »»» sign up in advance «««

A consortium of voluntary sector funders are soliciting a major review of local level activity, particularly as regards to digital strategy. Come and contribute to the report in the first of a series of facilitated workshops, where we will review examples of innovative projects and present new user research for discussion.

In this session, we’ll look at “Slipham”, a project simulating a fictional London borough.

Our previous workshop in May at the Centre for Ageing Better was attended by 45 people from over 30 organisations, and focused on how we could help older people discover the ecosystem of digital services aimed at improving their wellbeing.

Come to the second of our series of talks given by members of the Open Rights Group community.

Ever since the Snowden revelations in June 2013 there has been a growing awareness of the depth and breadth of the data we generate and how it renders us into ever more traceable objects of surveillance. The profoundly asymmetrical, political economic dimensions of the production and circulations of data have led to deeply problematic power relations wherein every keystroke, website visited or application downloaded are now rich sites of potential surplus value. With the proliferation of mobile platforms, digital footprints are expanding rapidly, especially those of young people. More…

This month we will be learning how to scrape data from the web using Nightmare.js, a node.js-based browser automation library.

Make sure to bring a laptop, as we will be following a tutorial together as a group. No programming experience is required.

After the tutorial, we will be staying in Newspeak House for an early Christmas party to celebrate the end of the year. Since we have no sponsor this month, it’s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beer or other beverage). There’s an off-licence a few doors down.

Be sure to check out the collaborative hackpad and add links to cool data journalism-related stuff you’ve seen in the last month for the show & tell section!

The importance of developing super-wellbeing in conjunction with super-longevity and super-intelligence

Social and economic implications of super-longevity

Shamil is a philosopher, entrepreneur and technology investor. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy within the School of Advanced Study at the University of London and Senior Advisor at Google DeepMind.

We’ll also have a talk from Katz Kiely on how we can better help people manage change and the importance of autonomy and a feeling of fairness in helping people thrive in change. Katz is a communication strategist who has worked with the UN, Ogilvy and other international organisations.

Exponential View events are hand-curated, participatory events tackling the most interesting and challenging questions of the day.

Your brains will be challenged and contribution expected, so we will serve dinner and drinks during the evening to keep you fuelled up.

Tom Steinberg (@steiny) has decided to start a book club/reading group for Newspeak House folk and their most thoughtful friends.

The club will meet once every 6 weeks, and will focus on books that relate to politics, activism, techno-social change, the news media, government innovation and failure.

Next up, a book about the moment when Britain truly became a democracy for the first time, and the amazingly tense and occasionally surreal events that it took to get us there.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, that’s absolutely perfect! That means you should really enjoy reading our second bookclub book ‘Perilous Question’ by Antonia Fraser.

Drop tom an email to tom@tomsteinberg.co.uk so he knows you’re interested.

Technological advance has long promised a world of leisure and liberation. Yet, embedded within class relations and capitalist production, for the mass of people automation has meant ever-intensifying exploitation.

Can technology’s revolutionary potential be captured for a different future, or will it remain wedded to the domination of capital?

Michael Roberts, radical economist and author of ‘The Long Depression’, discusses past and future technology in relation to the class struggle and capitalist crises.

Nick Srnicek, author of ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’, argues liberation can only be achieved through the acceleration of technological innovation.

Pol.is is currently in use by the vTaiwan initiative, through which hundreds of thousands have taken part in forming government policy on contentious issues such as regulation of Uber and AirBnB. Following the success of vTaiwan, Pol.is is now being experimented with by movements around the world. Attend this workshop to experiment with the platform and see what it can do.

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. Did you know that OpenCorporates has millions of records on non-profits and community contributors have created corporate groupings on them?

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Come to the first of our series of talks given by members of the ORG community.

We’ll be kicking off with a session on surveillance and totalitarianism in literature, and how the nightmarish world of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ can still be seen as relevant for the digital age. The talk will be lead by Dr. Simon Willmetts, lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull.

There will time for a Q&A afterwards before we de-camp to the pub. Please come along and bring any interested friends.

Artifical intelligence and deep learning are both interesting topics no matter where you choose to apply them. Many have thought of the considerations of AI in education, music, security and automation, but not a lot of practical thought has been put into AI and politics. At AI + Politics, we’re aiming to build politically disruptive AI. Though what does this mean? This could mean anything from an AI politician to a deep learning algorithm that changes people’s political persuasions over time.

Some of the tools you may consider using at this hack are Tensorflow, Keras, Alchemy & OpenCog.

Come along and build something with AI that will advance the inevitable robot apocalypse.

Outlandish are a digital co-op, who this year decided to give away some of their hard-earned income to run a funding program (the Outlandish Fellowship) for grassroots tech for good projects.

Through running this program, a number of fundamental questions arose, such as:

What are our shared values?

How do we best use resources to promote the change we want to see?

How do we define ‘good’?

Why do accountants find it so difficult to grasp the idea of giving money away?

We’d like to explore these and other related questions with the broader tech for good community both as an input to building the community and to encourage enquiry and discovery. To do this we’re hosting an event to mark the end of the experiment that was the Outlandish Fellowship. This will be a space to discuss, reflect and have your ideas and opinions heard in a group setting.

This will be an interactive event, held by an experienced facilitator, and is designed to bring together and involve anyone who would self-identify as being involved in tech for good, be that as a hacktivist, startup founder, freelance developer, member of a charity/NGO, funding organisation or anyone else missing from this list.

We would especially like to hear the voices of the under-represented in this space, e.g. female / non-white / non-cis developers, and from non-techie people, e.g. activists / campaigners who rely on tech.

We will also hear from members of Outlandish on their experience of setting up the fellowship, why they didn’t just spend their surplus on Kickstarter projects, and how sociocracy and tools like Loomio were used in the process.

The event will finish with drinks, while we listen to some rapid talks from the creators of the projects that were funded by the fellowship: Balu, Beehive, CoPitch, Cyclestreets, HelpText and Project Tide.

We really look forward to seeing you there; please direct any questions you have about the event to Matt (mp@outlandish.com).

Learn the LIVES data standard & lessons from scaling the standard in the US

What is LIVES?

The LIVES data standard presents restaurant inspection data from various jurisdictions in the same data standard, even if their score format differs. LIVES originated with the innovative public health and open data work of San Francisco and New York City, was coordinated with Yelp (the restaurant review website), and evolved from a 1.0 to a 2.0 standard in August, 2015. Over the last few years, the LIVES data standard launched restaurant inspection data in multiple open data portals and were ingested into restaurant information websites like Yelp. Governments use LIVES track, benchmark, and share their restaurant inspection data. A flexible and compelling open data standard, LIVES has lessons for anyone working with open data or in public health/food safety.

What will I learn?

At this workshop, you’ll learn the following:

The basics of mapping to, implementing the LIVES data standard

How to strategically engage stakeholders and potential data standard users

Lessons from LIVES on developing and evolving successful data standards

How data standards like LIVES can serve citizens AND governments, lowering costs, improving processes, and improving outcomes for citizens

Participants will receive:

An interactive workshop on LIVES

Access to LIVES best practices guide

Slide deck for sharing LIVES with stakeholders

One free hour of Smarter Civic consulting time (included in paid tickets)

Post-workshop happy hour

Who is hosting the LIVES workshop?

Meet Sarah Schacht, principal consultant with Smarter Civic. Schacht is a two time foodborne illness survivor who created the 2.0 versioning of the LIVES data standard in coordination with other LIVES stakeholders like Yelp. Her work as Public Health Data Advisor at Socrata led 10 governments, from small cities to national agencies, through the implementation process of the LIVES data standard. With more than a decade of experience in open government, civic technology, and open data, Schacht’s a published author (Open Government, by O’Reilly Publishing), public speaker (including Open Knowledge Fest & Con), and advisor to civil society (Transparency and Accountability Initiative) and governments in the US and internationally.

Through Smarter Civic, Schacht brings lessons from evolving the LIVES data standard, scaling its use, and implementing the standard for government launch and private sector ingest.

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach.

OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. We’re switching things up this time and will be running an API workshop as well as an investigation into a large multi-national corporation.

1800 - 1900 INTRODUCTION TO OPENCORPORATES & CURRENT PROJECTS

1900 - 2045 CORPORATE NETWORK & GROUPINGS: Arcadia Group & much more

2045 - 21:30 PUBLISH CORPORATE NETWORKS

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Join us in this meeting where we discuss how businesses can work with the voluntary and community organisations in our local areas and what is the best way to do that.

How can large and small businesses work with community groups and voluntary organisations to bring about social change? Is that possible and how can it be done?

This is the topic of this meeting where we will look at

• the current state of business (big and small) and its relationships with local communities, charitable and other organisations and debate if language and practices of CSR is enough.

• the changing and evolving perspectives and practices of micro and SME business and what does this suggest in terms of strengthening social responsibility expressed through cultivating good will with VC organisations/social groups in civil society

If FOI sounds like a bit of a dry subject, prepare to have your expectations challenged. We’ll be looking at the stories, scandals and changes FOI has kickstarted around the world, as well as some of the more edgy requests. When does an FOI request become something more?

We’ll also welcome Finnish artists Siiri Viljakka and Lauri Tuomi-Nikula, who’ll be explaining how comics might just be the best medium for educating a new generation of FOI users, and how the internet could be the saviour of FOI – a fundamental human right that celebrates its 250th anniversary this year.

The launch of a month-long celebration of open source software. We’ll be kicking off at 18:30 with an introduction and a basic guide on GitHub, finding projects to support and submitting pull requests.

It’s simple! First sign up on the Hacktoberfest site. If you open up four pull requests between October 1 and October 31, you’ll win a free, limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt. (Pull requests do not have to be merged and accepted; as long as they’ve been opened between the very start of October 1 and the very end of October 31, they count towards a free T-shirt.)

No contribution is too small—bug fixes and documentation updates are valid ways of participating.

Connect with other Hacktoberfest participants (Hacktobefestants?) by using the hashtag, #Hacktoberfest, on your social media platform of choice.

Please read our Events Code of Conduct before attending as it will be enforced. You can find it here: http://hackcodeofconduct.org/hacktoberfestldn

About Humanising Tech:
Humanising Tech is a community of 700+ UK-based researchers, technologists, therapists and industries practitioners interested in the convergence of human cognition, social behaviour, data analysis, artificial intelligence and mental health.
We believe in making better AI products by better understanding humans.

Spectacular advances have been made in computing recently, with topics like Deep Learning regularly grabbing the headlines. However we still have a lot to learn about the human psyche, starting with interpreting our own - sometimes elusive - emotive and cognitive processes, before such technologies can become truly integrated into human-computer interfaces and useful in our day-to-day lives.
Humanising Tech regularly hosts multidisciplinary lectures and meetups. We promote research and collaborations. On the long term, we hope to facilitate the creation exponential technologies, experiments and experiences that improve human understanding and human well-being.

About this event:
Although they have historically been regarded as diseases, neurological differences (including for example Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, ADHD, Dyscalculia, Autistic Spectrum, Tourette Syndrome, etc.) are increasingly recognised and respected as any other kind of human variation. Neurodiversity activists reject the idea that Autism, amongst others, should be cured, advocating instead for celebrating autistic forms of self-expression.

At Humanising Tech, we are always looking for ways to transcend the limitations of our “normative” brains and stretch our imagination. We have therefore invited friends from Auticon, the UCL, Status Today and more to help us think of challenges and opportunities around Autism, and reflect on the idea of neurodiversity.

We will ask them what do we know about how autistic people’s brains are wired? How do autistic people experiences differ from other people? Can technology help reduce misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people? Will understanding autistic people’s brains help us design better AI products?
And, generally speaking, what can people with “normative” brain learn from autistic people?

What will the world look like in ten or twenty years time as the digital revolution explodes around us? And how might we best steer this revolution for positive social outcome?

The meeting will be chaired by Francis Sealey of GlobalNet21 who will explain the collaborative venture. David Wood, chair of London Futurists, will set the context by providing a critical evaluation of one of the most significant and controversial books of 2016: “Homo Deus - A brief history of tomorrow”, by historian Yuval Noah Harari.

“Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century – from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.”

“Just as the 19th century created the working class, the coming century will create the useless class. Billions of people are likely to have no military or economic function. Providing food and shelter should be possible but how to give meaning to their lives will be the huge political question.”

Among the destructive powers that Harari highlights is the accumulation of data by companies such as Google and Facebook, and our increasing reliance on data-crunching algorithms in more and more areas of life. At the same time, online networks, with all-seeing powers of information gathering, are replacing traditional institutions. It’s perhaps no surprise that voters around the world have sensed a disturbing “loss of control” - control now lies with algorithms, rather than with conscious human deliberation.

In his review of Homo Deus, David Wood will assess the strengths of Harari’s argument, and issue a call to steer the digital revolution for positive social outcome.

This review will be followed by a group discussion to identify a number of specific topics for priority attention in future joint meetups - topics that the audience assess to be inadequately understood or to lack meaningful action plans. Examples could be drawn from the thinking of Harari, other recent writers, and the collective insight of the members of GlobalNet21 and London Futurists.

This group is for people who are interested in the future and maybe want to help shape it.

The acceleration of technology means that the near future may bring radical changes to all of us. Major developments in technologies like anti-aging, nanotech, genetics, computing, robotics, and geo-engineering are going to make the next few years very exciting - and possibly also very dangerous. We could gain god-like powers - but we might also lose sight of our humanity, and destroy everything that we used to hold dear.

What’s your view? Are things improving? Too slowly or too quickly? Are we are entering a new golden age? Or is the potential “Technological Singularity” something to fear? What does it mean to talk about “Human 2.0” and “Humanity+”? Or perhaps you view such talk as techno-hype? Maybe you just like the practical side of technology and want to find out more about possible paradigm shifts?

Anybody is welcome to this group - you don’t have to be a Techno Geek or work for some futuristic company to be in our group. The future applies to us all!

Come join in the debate - have your opinions voiced and maybe make some interesting new friends.

All we ask is that members treat each other with the respect they would want for themselves. Our group has members of many ages and backrounds. We have many different perspectives on what the future may bring and like to share different ideas with each other. We approach the future with a open mind and sense of humility. Our group mission is to introduce you to some of the ideas, advancements and people who are making our future happen today.

“GlobalNet21 is the leading forum in the UK for discussing the major issues in the 21st Century. We share a common concern for the sustainability of both our planet and the people on it. With almost 20,000 network members in the UK and abroad, we are making the debate, and democracy, more accessible by enlarging the Public Square and using social networks.

“As well as a network of individuals we have also set up a collaborative network of organisations to exchange good practice and transfer knowledge so that we can learn from each other. This network is cross boundary and includes local authorities, housing associations, universities, community groups and social enterprises. Our aim is through dialogue to celebrate diversity and develop community self-resilience and sustainability at a time of unprecedented social and environmental change.”

To avoid over-crowding, entrance will be strictly limited to people who »»» sign up in advance «««

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach.

OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. We’re switching things up this time and will be running an API workshop as well as an investigation into a large multi-national corporation.

1800 - 1900 INTRODUCTION TO OPENCORPORATES & CURRENT PROJECTS

1900 - 2045 CORPORATE NETWORK & GROUPINGS: Arcadia Group & much more

2045 - 21:30 PUBLISH CORPORATE NETWORKS

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com

Drones are increasingly being used in areas such as medicine to save lives, in conservation, to take spectacular aerial images and more controversially in defence and surveillance. With plans to expand their use even further into our everyday lives to deliver goods and services, how can open data make a difference in their development and use?

Short talks from:

Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge International – Welcome and introductions

The Fourth Group are a new group working together to create a new politics in the context of the fourth industrial revolution:

“The fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally reshaping the global economy and societies, and we are shifting the way we live, work, and play. How can we use the technological advancements of this age to create a new politics?

Building upon the momentum from the ideas in our Facebook group and first meetup, we are hosting our first Politech Hackathon to bring some of the buzzing ideas being discussed to life. We want to bring together people from the political and technology sectors to create a new politics in the context of the fourth industrial revolution. These two communities will be leading the forefront in shaping the future and it only makes sense to be collaborating now.

Over the course of a weekend, participants will ideate and prototype products, services, or platforms around the themes of efficiency, accountability, and political organisation. Want to help change the future of politics? Come and join us to imagine the new technologies to do this.”

Shad is a hacker and designer that has been organising and participating in civic hacks for years. He attended ParliHack from its second year. On top of this he worked as part of a team at the Refugees United hackathon in 2013 to help implement an SMS verification system for lost refugees looking to reconnect with their families securely.

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. For this event, we’re looking at AVIVA, G4S and Sodexo.
If you CAN code and have never written a bot - this is an excellent opportunity to learn!
If you can’t code but would still like to participate - there is plenty to do. We’ve got a brand new CORPORATE GROUPINGS feature which makes it really easy to create large corporate networks.

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up: slack.opencorporates.com

As the aftermath of the Brexit vote begins to unfold and nationalism continues to be on the rise all across Europe, it is more important than ever to animate our hopes in the possibility of transnational democracy. At this timely moment, European Alternatives invites you to a free screening and discussion of David Bernet’s fascinating film ‘Democracy’.

A David and Goliath story, ‘Democracy’ offers a captivating insight into the fight between citizen rights and big business, which meet on the EU’s legislative battleground over the making of the biggest data protection law in history. Following Green MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht and EU commissioner Viviane Reding for 30 months in their negotiations with activists, lobbyists and EU institutions, the documentary gives a first ever insight in European democracy in the making on this scale. It is a film about hope, persistence and power that provides both, an aesthetic and educational insight into topical debates around data protection and transnational politics alike.

‘Democracy’ raises a number of topical questions including “How does big data and surveillance influence our society?”, “What role can transnational alliances play in protecting citizen right?” and “How can democracy work across Europe?”, which we want to informally discuss after the screening.

Momentum, the movement that supports Jeremy Corbyn, has teamed up with Outlandish, a tech co-op from North London, to put on a hackathon to produce tech projects for social change.

The aim of the hack day is to bring together techies, Momentum members, and techie Momentum members and other experienced campaigners to build grassroots campaigning tools. We have some gaps we know about and ideas for things we’d like to create - and we’re really open to all your ideas that we might never even have thought of.

We’ll discuss the different ideas, and create teams to do a little bit of initial work on them. There are two £1,000 prizes for the most feasible and useful projects to help with delivery so that the tools are used to make a difference for the upcoming Labour leadership vote. Any other projects delivered from this session will be gratefully received and used to make a difference.

Draft agenda:

10.45am: Registration and introductions

11.15am: Welcome from Momentum and Outlandish. What kind of tools are we looking for? Who will use them and for what?

A meetup for people working on civic technology, empowering citizens, and government transformation.

Time to just hang out and enjoy an evening with nothing to do but get to know each other and chat about the topics of the day.. so erm, something about civic tech, democra-tech(?), future cities, campaign tech, govtech, impact, tech-for-good… what did we miss?

Many of us are feeling confused and worried about Brexit. But we must also recognise that now is a time of immense opportunity. People are listening; people are asking questions; people are talking. Now is the time to put ourselves out there, to engage in conversation, and to start to provide answers to those questions.

In the run up to the referendum, you may have seen claims by the “Leave” campaign that exiting the EU would mean that we would no longer have to worry about the threats posed by TTIP and CETA. Actually, it is more important now than ever to continue raising our voices for trade justice.

With the reality of Brexit looming, it is unlikely that our MEPs will get a say on what happens with TTIP or CETA. But these deals are part of a much bigger framework seeking to rewrite the rules of the global economy. No country will be immune. And as our government sets out to renegotiate our position in the post-Brexit world, they will certainly be looking to negotiate our own trade deals that will be the same or worse than TTIP and CETA. Whether the threats to our democracy, public services, human rights, environment and capacity for creative and free expression come under the transitory heading of ‘TTIP’, ‘CETA’, or a brand new deal negotiated by the Tories, the threats remain the same.

There is a pressing need now: to come together, to support each other, to answer each other’s questions, and to strategise about what Brexit means for the campaign for trade justice. So we are rescheduling this party, and instead we will be meeting on Thursday, 28th July from 18:30 - 23:00 at Newspeak House (133 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2 7DG). Join us for an evening of open discussion with wine, music, answers and action planning - discussion from 19:00 - 21:00, but all are welcome to come before and stay after to socialise.

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. For this event, we’re looking at AVIVA, G4S and Sodexo.
If you CAN code and have never written a bot - this is an excellent opportunity to learn!
If you can’t code but would still like to participate - there is plenty to do. We’ve got a brand new CORPORATE GROUPINGS feature which makes it really easy to create large corporate networks.

Hope to see you all there.

p.s. if you’re not on Slack already, please do sign up: slack.opencorporates.com

Using some of the videos from the Whistle Blowers Interview Archive, we’ll take a hands on approach to explore key concepts, ideas and techniques to identify narrative points, test out story ideas, and craft a compelling story.

This workshop focuses on the underlying evergreen storytelling principles that transcend the medium, so no knowledge of video editing required, just curiosity towards story telling principles and techniques.
Participants will be divided into groups of 3 to 4 people. The aim for each group is to produce a 3 to 5 minute video, given 3 short video interviews (roughly 15 min each) accompanied by their corresponding time-coded transcriptions.

Key story telling principles and techniques will be introduced to facilitate the process.

The aim of the workshop is for the participants to gain a hands on insight into the process of interviewed based documentary story crafting rather then producing a polished final product.

In 2013, the Government Digital Service introduced the Technology Code of Practice: a document giving guidance for government departments on how to design, buy and build technology and digital services.

Government technology has changed a lot since then, and GDS is planning an updated version. In advance of that, they are publishing a draft version to give the public the opportunity to comment. Come to a workshop at Newspeak House to discuss and give feedback.

A rolling hackathon for journalists, technologists, urbanists and citizens interested in Hackney issues. The idea is to create a space for people to pitch, create, and develop projects together. We do a new theme each month. Our theme this month is Housing.

We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach.

OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 100 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.

Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!
Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism. If you CAN code and have never written a bot - this is an excellent opportunity to learn! This is not a good place to learn HOW TO CODE though.

If you can’t code but would still like to participate - there is plenty to do. We’ve got a brand new CORPORATE GROUPINGS feature which makes it really easy to create large corporate networks. We’re looking at AVIVA, G4S and Sodexo at the moment.

Calling angry technologists. We think we know something other people don’t. Let’s do a bit of a post-mortem of the referendum, and talk about how we might be able to apply our skills to make politics better so we can start feeling proud of our country again. Even those of you who wanted brexit can’t be happy with what happened in the campaigns.

An event to bring together people who work in the privacy space from different perspectives - policy people, techies, activists, and academics at big companies, startups, universities, libraries, NGO’s, foundations, civil society and more.

Lovisa Moller a researcher from Action Aid on Tax Justice talking about the network of binding treaties that the UK has with developing countries.

David Mihalyi - Economic Analyst at the Natural Resource Governance Institute will highlight the work they have done around monitoring the extractive sector with open data

Whilst this event has a specific focus, as always, the meet ups are for anyone interested in openness in any form - from genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics and we cover the full spectrum including open data, open hardware, open education, open science, open geodata, open infrastructure and open government.

ORG London will be showing the Scenes of Reason documentary ‘The Haystack,’ a film which examines surveillance in Britain today, particularly in light of the debates in Parliament surrounding the Investigatory Powers Bill.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Olivia Cappuccini, founder of Scenes of Reason, which describes itself as an ‘independent media organisation that decodes news in an accessible, impartial and engaging format.’

Olivia will be joined by Ed Johnson Williams, campaigner at Open Rights Group.

Please join us for what should be a fascinating exploration of a controversial and hotly-debated subject.

Drinks and refreshments to be provided. Please do spread the word and feel free to bring guests.

Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for a day of liberating datasets from the clutches of closed data. If you can code and have never written a bot - this is an excellent opportunity to learn! This is not a good place to learn HOW TO CODE though.

If you can’t code but would still like to participate - there is plenty to do. We’ve got a brand new CORPORATE GROUPINGS feature which makes it really easy to create large corporate networks.

Everything we do begins with a thought. When you want to make a change in the world you find like-thinking people, but how do we move people from enthusaism to action?

In today’s highly volatile political and economic environment, better understanding and engaging people at the grass roots level, be they political communities or markets, has become essential.

Join us for a rare glimpse into one of the most powerful methodologies for understanding human perception, motivation, and behaviors—collectively known as thinking.

In this talk John Furey, Founder of MindTime, will share a simple, actionable model that you can immediately use in your own efforts to engage and motivate people. He will also speak about creating collaboration in political action groups or any group who wants to align, and deliver, with a common purpose.

By attending this event you will also undertand your own thinking better. Start by taking the MindTime profile at https://www.mindtimemaps.com/start/newspeakhousetalk/ and see your own thinking profile, then join in the discussion on the night.

As anyone who has tried to get a group of people to work together will understand, creating forward movement towards change is one of the hardest things to achieve. John Furey’s insights and knowledge have been instrumental in the success of hundreds of people based initiatives over the past 20 years.

Come and judge for yourself if what other’s have said is true… “lightbulbs were popping across a room of 120 agency decision-makers.” “It had everyone talking in the halls.” “This is magic…it gives you a better understanding of people as a whole.” “I tend to be a skeptic. But this got my attention like none other. It nails people’s work styles and the group dynamics.”

Following the Launch of Digital Bill of Rights campaign in the House of Commons on 12th May 2016, join us for the post-launch debrief and creation of the roadmap to getting the Bill to the House of Commons.

• How you can all pitch in to write a Bill of Digital Rights – Lucy Willis, author of upcoming “Collaborative Futures”

There has never been a better time to develop ideas for using technology to solve some of the toughest challenges we face in the world today. So how do you get a ‘tech for good’ idea off the ground?
Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) is an early stage investor and support programme for tech for good founders. We provide investment, support and intensive mentoring to great teams with ideas for using technology to tackle big social and environmental problems.

This event will give you a full understanding of the BGV accelerator programme. You’ll get the chance to meet some of the startups we’ve supported and learn what it’s like to be part of the growing BGV community. You’ll also get a 20 minute 1:1 session with a BGV team member or mentor to chat through your idea and cover off any unanswered questions you might have.

6.00pm Welcome and registration

6.15pm What happens at BGV

Who do we support? What does the 12 week programme entail? How much do we invest? Who are our mentors? What other support do we offer? What does it mean to be part of the BGV community?

6.30pm Stories from our startups

Meet other tech for good founders who have been through the BGV programme. Learn from their experiences first hand and hear their tips for getting the most out of BGV.

6.45pm Q&A panel with founders and mentors

7.00pm Networking and 20 minute 1:1 sessions

Meet with fellow founders and chat with some of the BGV startups. During this time you’ll also be allocated a 20 minute slot to meet 1:1 with BGV team members and mentors.

High-tech tools of exploitation are being repurposed to build a fairer economy.

The digital platforms that have become the connective tissue of our lives - the likes of Airbnb and Google - have proven to tend towards monopolies, monetisation of surveillance and disregard for labour standards.

But what stops us from using the Internet’s power for collective action to usurp them with alternatives?

What if taxi drivers were to seize control of their own platform and run it democratically? And what would an Amazon look like, were it not only to push wares, but to distribute power and accountability?

Outlandish invites you to an evening of discussions on the opportunities and challenges of making the vision of Platform Co-operativism a reality in the UK and abroad.

Are you part of one yourself? Do you know of any interesting examples from the UK? Get in touch!